


Down Girl

by meggannn



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Colonist (Mass Effect), F/M, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Post-Canon, Ruthless (Mass Effect), Slow Build, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 01:39:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13893531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meggannn/pseuds/meggannn
Summary: Something’s gotta give.





	Down Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



>   * For the Fandom Loves Puerto Rico auction, this is for @damalur, who I am genuinely blessed to call a friend. Her prompt asked for Torfan in “whatever direction is most interesting to me.” Out of appreciation for all the brilliant fic she's given her fandoms over the years, this was also inspired by/written partly in homage to her utterly fantastic "[Limit of the Flesh](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5119466)."
>   * [The N7 oath was loosely based around the Navy Seal ethos listed here.](http://www.public.navy.mil/NSW/Pages/EthosCreed.aspx)
>   * [There’s also a playlist for this fic](https://soundcloud.com/user-396307936/sets/down-girl), which mostly just consists of the music I was listening to as I wrote it. I'll probably be adding more to it later as I work on Part 2.
>   * **Betas** : Big thanks and much appreciation to Keely, @skogrr, and @thunderheadfred for taking time out of their busy schedules to help with this one <33
> 

> 
> **WARNINGS:** Please read my list BELOW and do not rely on the AO3 tags. Shepard is not in a good mental or emotional place in this fic. **I didn't use the AO3 warnings to tag some of these, particularly the implied rape/noncon** , because I didn't want to imply the Shepard/Garrus depicted in this fic is the source of the gory R-rated content, which it isn't. This is the first of two planned parts and violence **will** get a bit worse in part two, so the tags might be updated later to reflect future content. If you’re uncomfortable with seeing the characters in bad places (mentally, emotionally, environmentally) and making bad choices, or if you start and need to stop in the middle, then please take whatever steps you need. To that end, feel free to [contact me](http://meggannn.tumblr.com/ask) if you would like more details on the specifics of the content before deciding to read.
> 
>   * General: Sex and mature language
>   * Violence: mild gore/body horror, canon-typical violence, thematic content consistent with the realities of Shepard's job
>   * Environmental: drug trade and **ME-style slavery and sex slavery, implied torture, implied non-con**
>   * Shepard's post-war headspace: trauma, PTSD, survivor's guilt, emotional issues, unhealthy coping mechanisms, etc
> 


 

 

 

I.

If she were ever asked to write it down, she’d start it like this:

Shepard remembered waiting for the hammer to fall ever since returning from Torfan. On the ride back to base, she had watched the pale white moon shrinking innocently into the blackness of empty space and felt unnervingly calm; the full weight of the calamity had not yet settled in. But the thought had struck her even then: this might be her final moment of peace before she was swallowed up herself — by the brass, the press, the Hegemony’s attention.

Back on base, she had reported to Major Kyle. She gave her statements to Alliance Parliament. Accepted probation. Submitted herself to re-training. Her single star was suspended indefinitely. A week passed, and then two. Four. The Siege of Torfan became an incident, and then a public debate about war crimes, and then a political commentary about _batarians who had it coming_. Eventually, it all fell out of the public eye entirely, as these things did.

And then, on a balmy Sunday morning two days before she was stationed for redeployment to Monretta Station in the Traverse, the profile hit. Shepard opened her terminal in the mess hall to find her name on the front page of The New Washington Gazette. She had spent four weeks putting a name to the heaviness in her stomach — _guilt_ — and seeing her failures listed out, publicly acknowledged, that word suddenly felt justified, fully realized. All she could think was, _finally_.

Shepard hadn’t recognized the reporter — some young hotshot from San Francisco with an inheritance and an illegal camera drone, who seemed to be of the opinion that war journalism on Earth was growing tedious, and might prove more thrilling out in galactic space. His inexperience, however, hadn’t deterred him from penning a tell-all exposé on a woman he had never met.

His angle pulled no punches from the first line: Shepard was recklessness, amoral, and overall unsuitable for command, an opinion pieced together from public records, interviews, and — of course — quotes taken out of context. There was a breakdown of Captain Anderson’s defense of his protégé (“It’s hardly a leap to assume his support of Shepard might have less to do with her capabilities and more to do with earning another shot at Spectre candidacy vicariously through his mentee”) along with a list of her officer training scores (“Few out there would call Shepard’s prowess into question — however her methods as a representative of our race and military might are concerning for all that value diplomacy and the sanctity of life”). There were even bits of the clipped, unrehearsed public statement she had given in the immediate aftermath about _repealing the enemy_ and _delivering justice_ , which, quite frankly, had spoken for themselves.

Anderson had warned her of the dangers of the spotlight. As a marine, her job was to serve and protect. Personal fame was, if not the antithesis, at best only tangential to the ideals she had sworn her life to at age eighteen.

“Sharks take any name they can find,” a sympathetic marine — Corporal Russo — said to her that evening, and in his native language, he called the reporter something foul that Shepard’s translator didn’t attempt to parse. Sharks were long extinct, of course, but much in the way of dinosaurs and mammoths, they had made their mark in human legend: beasts of the sea that lurked just beneath the waves, following the scent of death. Apt slang for the average war reporter. 

Russo put his hand on her shoulder and said, “My mom got demoted under pressure after her name came up for abandoning her tenth unit.” His mouth grew pinched. “It wasn’t even her call. And you know what happened to the Williamses. The public doesn’t understand how the chain of command works. Your moment’ll pass.”

Russo might have been right, had the reporter not shared the contents of Shepard’s enlistment interview.

Of course, enlistment records were reserved for sanctioned war journalists — a list to which this particular individual was not included. The Alliance swooped down with a court case immediately, but the fact that the records were illegally obtained didn’t seem to matter to the public — the damage to her reputation had been done.

She read the article on her cheap terminal in New Washington’s west garrison; the author had positioned a clip from her interview just after a thorough censure of her service and just before the breakdown of Major Kyle’s culpability as her CO. How had he gotten the footage? Was it just very believable vid-editing software? It didn’t matter. It looked like her, sounded like her. The Alliance’s response to the journalist in the form of a very expensive and belabored lawsuit all but confirmed its legitimacy.

But to Shepard, it might as well have been another woman on the screen: eighteen-year-old Jane felt a lifetime away from the person who had just watched her name go down in infamy. 

“You have no family in the service,” an anonymous male voice said from offscreen. It was the physician that had been appointed to her just before shipping off to boot camp.

“None,” the Jane of yesteryear replied.

“I can’t help noticing you haven’t expressed any personal interest in enlisting,” his voice said.

“I have my letters of — ”

“Your recommendations are commendable, but they’re not from you,” the man said. Sighed. “Let me be more clear. Jane, I’m the last signature between you and boot camp. Before I sign this form, I need to make certain every person who passes through my office is stable, mentally and physically. That includes emotional health. You will not be given a gun and told to run wild. With the Hegemony pressing in on the Verge, we are warning recruits more often that they should expect to see heavy conflict, perhaps even war, within their first formal tour. Current politics can get — complicated, for people with histories shaped by batarian expansion. If you have any — well.” He cleared his throat. “The Alliance needs to hear it from you. In absence of parental authority, we have a duty to the state to ensure minors that are enlisting are aware of their… options.”

She kept coming back to this bit, years later. To this day she didn’t know why she’d said the things she did.

The girl on the screen closed her eyes. The silence lasted a bit longer than might normally be acceptable, but the tension, even on screen, had an air of expectation, as though the interviewee were not stumbling for an answer, but putting her words together piece by piece for the most impact.

“What happened on Mindoir is why I’m here,” her eighteen year old self said quietly, “but to answer the question you’re really asking, I’m not going to shrink when I see combat. I know exactly what I’m signing up for — I’ve seen first-hand exactly what happens in an alien attack. After— I realized how badly they need recruits to defend ourselves. If I wasn’t here, I’d be a slave behind enemy lines. I’d rather be here. No kid should go through what I did. I want to protect our colonies, and I know sometimes it means eliminating the source of the threat entirely. If they’ve got four eyes, the better — they’ll be easier to hit. Either way I’ll be ready. I already know what’s waiting out there.”

A child’s answer. Looking back and seeing this defiant, naive stranger on screen, was almost laughable. _Kid_ , Shepard often thought, _you don’t have the first fucking clue what's waiting out there_.

And then everything was out in the open. For however much the Alliance tried to hush it up, a salarian news team picked up on on the piece, and then an asari outlet. _Stemming from a clear early bias against the batarian race due to the attack on her homeworld, are Shepard’s actions on Torfan in any way a surprise?… A classic subject of youth xenophobia elevating to disastrous consequences in adulthood, a trait becoming quite common in human colonists as the Alliance expands its reach… One wonders how her proctors are feeling now…_

Eventually it hit the entirety of Council space, and then her name represented something it never meant to. Shepard meant _that war criminal? Wasn’t she like twenty? Didn’t she get decommissioned?_

It meant hearing distaste in the reply, _Nope. She’s still out there. Invited to ICT. Got a bloody N7._

_You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me._

To this day, she still avoided watching herself on camera, but this old interview was different. When she watched the old vids, read the old reports, it always came with a heavy sense of responsibility. Her therapist, and many others besides, might have called it masochism. Shepard called it duty.

Of course, far more damaging accusations had hit her name in the ten years since. Far more well-researched, too. Not all of the rumors were true, but enough mud had been flung her way that when she looked back at her service, she struggled to feel pride.

Still, she kept that first article saved in her files, even now. She hadn’t opened it in years, but she didn’t need to. That it was there was reminder enough.

 

 

 

II.

The war had been good to Garrus, if such a thing was possible, though Shepard would never say so aloud. He had come out from the Battle of London with a rank in the Hierarchy so high she suspected she could count the distance between himself and the Primarchy on one hand. The skyrocketing jump in citizenship tiers was still enough to embarrass him out of talking about it, and not to be outdone, his close friendship with the Primarch of Palaven was still a topic of great interest among the hand-shakers and political pundits of the Hierarchy.

Shepard, by comparison, had resigned her commission as soon as she was able to lift a stylus to a datapad during her recuperation in the Alliance hospital in Suffolk. She fully intended to find a cabin in the woods on some backwater planet spending the rest of her years as an untraceable hermit, until her name meant nothing once again.

The Alliance — and indeed most of humanity — hadn’t let her go without a fight. They’d managed to stick a promotion and nine medals onto her uniform before Hackett secured the signatures needed for an honorable discharge. As it was, there were still several award delegates to whom she owed formal letters of thanks, at least three presidents from Earth to strongly discourage from submitting her name for a Nobel Prize, and a Queen of England still putting around somewhere down on Earth to turn down her offer of a knighthood.

It was this last one that Garrus found profoundly amusing for some reason that Shepard couldn’t quite understand. She considered herself fortunate he was as open-minded as he was with human quirks and oddities, far past the tolerance she’d expect of an alien with limited exposure to humans before his service on the SR-1. But he had held onto a tendency to get hung up on the strangest things in a way that fluctuated between charming and frustrating. (The human trend of keeping reptiles as pets, for example. Knee-high socks, but not socks themselves. Hair-straighteners.)

“You’ll be a knight?” he asked her over breakfast in the mess hall of the HMS Perentia. His mandibles flared at her in a grin, and Shepard prepared herself for another dive into human history that he would undoubtedly take out of context for the sole purpose of mocking her about it later. Garrus had a funny way of seeing past her dismissals to hone in on exactly what irritated her without even trying; never enough to fully aggravate her, but just enough to keep her on her toes. She had often thought, privately, that had fate twisted differently, and she ever ended up on the wrong side of an interrogation table in C-Sec, that she might not have stood up half as well as she had been trained to, given the embarrassing way her mask always managed to slip when he was around. She certainly would never have managed to pass Infiltration and Recon with flying colors in N4 had Detective Vakarian been her proctor.

“No,” she told him now for what must at least have been the fourth time, “knighthood is just a title.” It’d be _damehood_ , technically, but she didn’t feel up to explaining that one in the face of his amusement.

“But you have knights, and all that,” he said, still smiling. She could see more teeth than usual; a sign he was feeling confident, in this case, that he had discovered a new well from which he might draw more amusements at her expense. “And those animals you sit on? Cows?”

“Horses,” Shepard said testily, then took another bite of reheated potatoes to avoid looking at his smug face. “I don’t know why you’re hung up on this. Every militaristic species has had some form of knight protectors in their Middle Age-analogue. I’m sure the Hierarchy has weird traditions, too.”

“We never rode around clanking on animals that don’t see straight, or covered ourselves head-to-toe in inflexible armor. It’s just not practical.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, deciding a surrender would be the best course of action for now. “As you delight in reminding me, humans are rather squishy.”

He smirked at her but said nothing, agreeing to disengage. Shepard mashed a bit of her dry hash browns into a pulp, mixing in a smear from the remains of her ketchup pool. Azymadus tried, he did, but his levo cuisine left something to be desired. Not that Shepard would ever say so aloud; she’d come to the unsettling suspicion lately that Gardner had spoiled her as commander of the SR-2. But if Garrus could stomach three tours’ worth of subpar dextro MREs, she was determined to bring as much attention to her troubles of opposite-chirality cooks as he had on the Normandy. That was to say, none at all.

“I’ll make sure we restock the levo rations at the next port,” Garrus said out of nowhere. He was staring down at her plate, because of course he’d notice. She realized with a pang of embarrassment that she’d practically licked her fork clean on the last bite.

Shepard rolled her eyes. “I’m eating all of my four food groups, Captain, don’t worry.”

“Come on. You’re still recovering.”

“I’ve been recovering for three years,” she grunted, stabbing at a pea. “Don’t go looking for problems, Garrus. You’ll waste time fixing stuff that isn’t broken.”

“That your official word of advice?” He leered, head tilted to the side with an unreadable expression. “ _Mentor?_ ”

“I’m aware of the hypocrisy,” Shepard said dryly. “I’m doing fine, Garrus. We’re not stranded in the middle of the outback. Don’t mark this one on your to-do list.”

He hmm’d. “Well we can spare some resources for the savior of the galaxy, Shepard. Ask if you need them.”

He went back to his own meal. Another curious thing Garrus was prone to doing lately, on top of getting pedantically hung up on obscure humanisms, was to sneak in deferential mentions to Shepard’s legacy from the war — as though she needed reminding. His firebrand, pushing the notion of what he believed she “deserved,” or perhaps even “earned,” this nebulous reimbursement in honor or money or medals that she suspected even he didn’t know how to quantify.

Normally, the discussion of her celebrity was one of the quickest ways to test her mood, but from a very few choice of people — the majority of whom had served on the Normandy with her — she knew not to take offense. From anyone else, being reminded of what she’d done — who she’d become in the past eight years, what _Jane Shepard_ meant now — felt ironic, almost sarcastic. An inside joke that the rest of the universe got to find funny, but she was merely the vessel. Comments like that were for the people that were never there; who didn’t see or create bodies in abundance in such frequency; they were never really for her.

_You killed how many in that stronghold? You started how early?_

_Sure. You can play the hero for a while, if you want._

She forced herself back into the moment. “Thanks,” she said shortly.

He raised his head. “You okay?”

She nodded. She wasn’t sure why he still asked questions like that; he knew by now that she always gave the same answer.

“You and Nguyen are the only levos on board. You’ve seen the budget. It’s not like we can’t afford to splurge a little for a Spectre.”

“Garrus,” she sighed, “really. Don’t worry about it.”

He raised a hand in surrender. “Don’t say I didn’t offer, then.”

“I won’t mention it,” she said dryly. “And I certainly won’t mention to the Council that you aren’t above bribing the agent currently assessing you for Special Tactics.”

“So that’s how it’s going to be,” he laughed. “I think I could do worse to put this candidacy in danger.”

“True,” Shepard said. “You didn’t trigger a Prothean beacon to explode in your face on your first shakedown.” _Or get your overseer killed before he could promote your name back on the Citadel._

“There’s time yet.” He tossed a slice of meat that looked like a strip of pale blue bacon into his jaws, then smirked a bit slyly. “I suppose this is where I’m supposed to thank you for seconding my nomination and say how lucky I am to have you around.”

“Lucky that you have my experience to imitate, you mean.”

“Well,” he said smugly in that way that warned her he was just trying to push her buttons, “an argument could be made that Legate Vakarian might even be _more_ experienced than Commander Shepard was, at the time of their respective nominations.”

“Could it,” she said.

“I never said _I_ was the one making the argument.”

“Legate Vakarian is four years older than Commander Shepard had been at the time of her nomination. Vakarian having fought through a war as well, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Though,” Garrus said diplomatically, as though only now making an attempt to be fair in this ludicrous comparison, “I wasn’t the youngest marine to earn a promotion to a second lieutenant in the field at the age of twenty-four. I suppose it evens out.”  
  
Shepard paused. It took her a moment to collect her voice.

“Are,” she tried. “Are we still speaking comparatively?”

Garrus seemed to realize what he had just said. The topic he had just raised. His face went slack and for a half-second, they both stared at each other in shock.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” he said immediately. “Sorry — I, ah.”

Shepard, who had never been apologized to for bringing up the topic of Torfan — certainly not framed in such a way that said she had _earned_ a promotion for her role there — was at a complete loss for how to form a response.

Fortunately, she was saved the trouble by arrival of the Parentia’s XO, Lucret Xamius.

“Captain.” Lucret was a tall turian woman with light purple colony markings. She gave a crisp salute as she reached their table, then presented a datapad for inspection. “The weekly stocks. I want to get these approved before we hit Sarlik. I noticed we’re running low on eezo, paladium — several other requests from the gunnery chief. I have them sorted by current availability along with necessity. With your approval.”

If she hadn’t still been watching him, Shepard wouldn’t have noticed Garrus glancing back to her in the half second before he responded.

“Thanks, Lu.” He took the report and diligently scrolled through. “I’ll have this back by the end of the day shift.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lucret nodded at Shepard politely before departing; Shepard watched her grab a ration bar from a dispensary cabinet at the end of the mess hall, and then retreat back into her office, where Shepard knew she would spend the rest of her evening eating at her desk and typing at her monitor deep into the night.

“She works too hard,” Shepard said, still watching the door.

“You’re telling me,” Garrus muttered, eyes still on the requisitions list. “Invited her to happy hour back on Cipritine before we left. She stammered out an excuse and just went back to the office. I’m starting to get why people make fun of us for being workaholics.”

Shepard turned back to him, eyebrow raised. “You invited her for a drink the night before cast off?”

Garrus looked up at her now. Blinked. “Yeah?”

Shepard stared back. “An offer from one officer to another?”

He frowned. “What else would it be?”

Garrus had handled the rise in status quite well. Professionally. What he still had trouble with was the social intricacies of his new command, by which she meant, he had a tendency to mix the personal with the professional in a way she was unsure if the Hierarchy would appreciate, or ever really understand. More examples of her bad influence, she was certain — and more responsibility she had to nudge him back into the right direction.

But this wasn’t the time or place. She shook her head. “Miranda had problems tearing herself away from the office too. On the Citadel once, I threatened to have EDI ban her from the Normandy for forty-eight hours if she didn’t get some proper shore leave. She snarled at me but disappeared for four full days, then strode back onto the ship in a huff just in time for cast-off.”

Garrus snorted. “I’ll try that.”

Shepard’s alarm on her tool went off. She muted it, then rose to place her remains in the trash. “I should get back to it.”

Garrus stood with her, gathering his things. “Will I — ah.” He stopped and stood motionless for a moment; Shepard paused too, suddenly aware that they were both in the middle of a very public mess hall within a moderately-sized warship, where anybody might see, surely, that things could be more than casual.

There was no one around.

“See you later,” he finished eventually. His hand was at his side now, but he was still staring at her.

She nodded.

Before she could react, he leaned down and pecked her on the cheek — his imitation of a kiss, she guessed. Then he deposited his tray on the rack, and departed for the elevators without another word.

Shepard stood frozen, staring after him.

It was ultimately harmless. He’d probably read about it in one of those advice magazines. But for all her supposed valor, she still hadn’t managed to bring herself to raise the issue about — things like that. How they gave the wrong impression, even when no one was around. How it was the kind of thing couples did; not even on her own ship would she have found the gall.

But she knew she wouldn’t say anything. Despite that saying nothing would be to give him the wrong idea — Garrus’s confidence in their relationship aside, she refused to shake this tiny, rickety boat, for reasons she still didn’t quite understand. Their positions. This fragile, tentative stability. The reality of the galaxy outside. A kiss on the cheek, however inappropriate, was utterly harmless. Eventually, they’d find an equilibrium; eventually, he’d learn what things like that meant. But not now.

Besides. A little thing like that — it was nice, is all.

* * *

Ironically, Shepard now spent most of her time in the main battery.

The Parentia was designed to prioritize speed over warfare; her main and only gun was a M70 Warsaw, a 2184 human-salarian construct based off of the remains of Sovereign tech that had been made in response to the Hierarchy’s Thanix of ‘83. Garrus had found it funny, for some reason, upon its discovery during his first tour of the Parentia. Even now, with turian-human interspecies cooperation at its highest point in decades, their history of one-upping the other since the First Contact War seemed about the only reliable thing in the universe.

Only a skeleton crew was assigned to the cruiser on its first shakedown. Garrus had led it, and every mission since — a series of small-time SAR missions, and the occasional raid on pirate squads — while Shepard remained on the ship, quietly observing through the vid and audio feed streaming from his visor. While she wasn’t restricted from offering advice, or even joining the ground crew should the need arise, Shepard considered either a last resort. Despite that their mutual service history was well established in public record, she had never been accused of being a hand-holder, and she refused to start now. Garrus would earn this himself, or he wouldn’t earn it at all. Not that she had doubts.

Garrus certainly seemed unbothered by her distance, if he noticed it at all. He led like a turian, of course: all sharp commands and duty and honor and all that, though if she felt like flattering herself, she liked to imagine she saw a bit of herself in his command, as well. A hand on the shoulder after a bad fall. A joke over the comm to keep morale high. Maybe she was imagining her own influence, or maybe this what Garrus had been like with his own team, back in those vigilante days on Omega, inspired even back then by his time with her while fighting Saren. Privately, she liked to think so.

Garrus had always been sentimental. It was a trait he had convinced himself made him a weak leader after Omega, but watching him in action now, seeing him mow down raiders on stolen ships like a swift but brutal hurricane, noting how he visited his crew to destress and check in on injuries — Shepard knew better. To say aloud that his care for his team was his greatest strength would have been cliche; and besides, he wouldn’t have believed her anyway.

Her days, meanwhile, were spent in the long but narrow hall that housed the Warsaw. “Inactive advisory duty” read the deployment notice she had received from the Council; it had taken her five months of arguing on and off with the asari councilor over the comms to achieve even that much. Shepard was not a part of this crew, nor was she technically an active agent under either Alliance or Citadel jurisdiction, but she intended to pull her own weight. She maintained the armory with Gunnery Officer Stilx. She helped the rover with repairs. She assisted Lucret with the occasional errand or administrative housekeeping. Sometimes she shot the breeze with the pilot, a young woman named Thilma just out of school and nervous as a newborn deer to be flying two war heroes.

The mindless, nonessential shipwork was freeing, in a strange way; it had been a long time since she’d found herself in a position to disappear into grunt work without the nagging feeling that she was procrastinating on a larger pressing matter.

The drawback was that without a crisis every other day, it allowed her thoughts to wander. Inactivity made her hand shake with anticipation, itching for a trigger to pull. And when it did, she found her way to the cargo bay, where the technicians had set up some weights and a bag. She’d seen a few of them wrestling on a large mat; she once asked to spar, and the immediate,  shocked silence in the bay had been enough to hear a pin drop. She hadn’t asked again.

In what little time was left, and only when she was very, very certain they would go unnoticed, she spent with Garrus in his cabin.

She spent it sleeping on his thin sofa after falling asleep over mission logs and requisitions requests. She spent it riding him into the mattress of his downy-soft turian bed, hard enough to familiarize her with the sound of a turian’s deep, guttural gasp when her fingers formed a vice around his waist. She spent it debating telenovelas over shitty liquor he’d stolen from contraband before takeoff. She spent it being fucked against the door, biting her own lip, gasping in perverse delight as his plates rubbed her skin raw.

There was no VI to spy on them. No cameras. They locked the door and soundproofed the seals. This wasn’t the Normandy. No turian marine in their right mind would ever bother the captain in the middle of the night with some asinine request —

“Oh,” she gasped. “ _God_.”

Garrus’s tongue ran along her collarbone; he was very fond of those. Tracing them, biting them, licking them. A turian thing, she was sure — he was also fond of her abdomen, the outline of her rib cage under breasts, the curved ridges of her spine, the delicacy of her wrist bones. The way each of her ten fingers pressed into the soft hide of his waist now. He moaned into her; his breath warmed her skin, just over her heart.

Between her legs was a fire: Garrus was its source and center. He tasted like metal; he smelled like gun oil and the smoke of battle; he felt like a kick from a mule, right into her core.

Sometimes it was still too much, sometimes she couldn’t bring herself to look. Her head was tossed back against the pillow, eyes scrunched tight. He never minded. He liked her neck bared like that. Her right leg hung over his waist, and her left thigh lay to the side. Her prosthetic had been left somewhere on the sofa.

She was close again. He’d already gotten her off during foreplay with those long, strange, wonderful fingers that felt like suede and met her core like a goddamn bullet —

Speaking of. There were fingertips on her spine, smashed between her back and the sheets. Each against a ridge, _pressing_. God.

She finished with her teeth in her lips again, nails deep in his tender waist, and she let herself be swept away when it came, like a tide pulling her just underneath the surface before emerging again a new woman, a blank slate. She lived for those meager seconds of nothing but raw satisfaction, when nothing was expected of her and nothing weighed her down except the warm body of her most trusted friend in the universe. Sometimes she thought it was all she lived for.

Garrus took a few minutes more. She helped him: her fingers left his waist and trailed the base of his cock, rubbed where they were still joined.

“ _Shepard_ ,” he choked. “Please — ”

Shepard dug her right heel into the base of his spine. She hissed filthy things into his ear, things they might try together, things she suspected he wanted to do with her but hadn’t drawn up the courage to propose; and he came with a moan and an overwhelming rush, sighing into her ear. In moments like these she was certain beyond doubt that their alien lungs breathed the same air, spoke the same visceral language of trust and intimacy.

When he was loose and languid in this liminal time before either of them broke the silence with words, she thought often of proposing a runaway fantasy she had tucked away for a rainy day, something they had never tried before: of turning off their translators and going where the night took them. There were a million reasons not to, of course — what if something went wrong, what if there was an emergency, what if one needed to stop and couldn’t articulate — but she dreamed of putting their natural partnership to this test in the most literal of ways, to see if he understood her as much as she thought she did him.

“You can make noise.” Garrus’s low murmur brought her back to reality. He sounded a bit out of breath.

No longer lost in thought, Shepard looked to him. His forehead was against her collarbone, and his back rose and fell with breaths. “What?” she asked.

“You’re always — so quiet,” he said, still catching his breath. “Have a little faith in turian engineering. The walls really are soundproofed.”

Shepard laughed a bit out of surprise. She was pleasantly tired and felt a bit lightheaded. The ache between her legs was comforting, like that following a satisfying workout. A muscle exercise, a scratch itched. “Noted,” she said, and then, reluctantly, “All right. Up, please.”

He removed himself from her obligingly and rolled to the side. Shepard pushed herself gingerly to the edge of the bed and reached for the towel within Garrus’s nightstand. Her fingers touched an empty drawer. She blinked.

“Sorry,” he said behind her. She turned; Garrus was wiping the inside of his carapace, the only place his body ever drew up a meager sweat. “I tossed those in the wash. Here.”

He passed her his washcloth. She pat down her brow and neck, wiped out her collar bones, where she still felt the lingering ghost of his tongue and teeth.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “I wanted to apologize.”

Shepard was startled. “Beg your pardon?” It’d been a long time since he’d apologized for any rough plates or sharp edges in bed — she thought they were over that.

“About what I said, today. It wasn’t… it was just banter. You know. But still.” Garrus was no longer the awkward bachelor stepping tentatively into her quarters with a bottle of wine like he was preparing to feed it to a mother bear, but she still saw shades of that insecurity when he got nervous. What it was this time, she couldn’t possibly imagine; she thought it best sometimes to just hear him out instead of guessing whatever was going on in that strange mind of his.

Shepard blinked. “We talked a lot today.”

He sighed. “About what I said, about Torfan,” he clarified, and finally met her eyes. “I know you don’t talk about it.”

For the second time today Shepard was at a loss for words. “Uh — ” She cut herself off and tried again. “Garrus, I wasn’t offended.”

He looked warily skeptical. “You seemed hurt.”

“I — ” She shook her head. “I was just surprised. It’s not li — ” She stopped herself again. _Not like it’s something I have a right to be hurt over._ Childish. “I know what you meant. It’s all right.”

Garrus didn’t look entirely reassured, but he didn’t press it. As she finished wiping the sweat from between her thighs, he rose and collected her prosthetic from the couch. Shepard tossed the cloth in the hamper below his bed, then muttered a thanks when he handed over her leg.

She hated having the prosthetic on in bed together: without clothes, the damn thing felt and looked like a barbell, and she found it equally arousing. Garrus had never expressed an opinion, but then, he was too polite, so she had made the executive decision for the both of them. He was quiet as she lined up the notches, clicked the safety, and locked the clamps shut. A small popping sounded for each bolt as the nerves reconnected to the metal transponders within the knee. By the count of five, her skin was tingling like she had plugged her leg into a light electric current, the sign that she was fully mobile once again.

She noticed he was watching her fingers work quietly.

“What,” she said, not unkindly, “confused how ten fingers work again?”

His mandibles fluttered in that way he did when he was just humoring her. “Does it not hurt, removing it? For — ” He gestured to the bed a bit haphazardly. “If there’s an easier, uh… position…”

She was strangely touched, but tucked that away for later. “No,” she said. “Just gets a little — ” Her mouth twisted. She couldn’t think of the right word; there was no accurate comparison. “Heavy,” she settled on, inadequately, not entirely referring to weight.

He nodded and thankfully didn’t ask anything else. “You want the shower first?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” She paused. Checked the clock on the nightstand. Hm. _Shit._

There was something unidentifiable in Garrus’s voice when he said, “No one’ll notice if you dip out of mine in the middle of the night cycle.”

Shepard chewed her lip. Normally, no. But for some reason, tonight the thought of leaving the familiarity of his cabin to retire to her cot in her small, private room in the crew’s quarters, where she would struggle for sleep for hours alone in the night with only her thoughts, and rise unrested with the morning shift, made her inexplicably exhausted. 

Every time she hesitated, Garrus insisted she stay. Tonight was no different.

“Take the bed,” he offered. “I’ve got the couch.”

“Garrus,” she sighed. This felt wrong. Not the staying — but the way it always happened, how she let it happen, like a child feigning illness to a parent to stay home from school. She didn’t know what to call it, but it felt wrong in some way, like an emotional betrayal to the both of them.

“The chair is more comfortable anyway,” he said, and she knew there’d be no talking him out of it now. “Let me get you a towel.”

Then — before he rose from the bed, he leaned in closer, and before she could register, he did it again. He pressed his mouth to her cheek, that imitation kiss, and then departed. It felt less like a romantic gesture and more something comforting, like one might give to a friend; did he feel as though he had to do it?

And once again, Shepard told herself she should say something now, before he left and the moment passed. Ask him why or what it meant. But her courage abandoned her and she said nothing, and he departed the cabin for the hamper station down the corridor.

Alone with her thoughts, Shepard fiddled with her knee. The strain was still tighter than she liked, even after taking a flathead to it herself; her biomechanical surgeon was forever telling her to request a shipboard specialist to the Parentia for on-site maintenance that the ship’s doctor couldn’t handle, and Shepard continued to ignore her. There was no problem her prosthetic threw at her that was severe enough to warrant an extra physician. As far as she was concerned, she was a temporary guest; she elected to remain as low-maintenance as possible.

She wondered occasionally and vaguely what the Council’s plans for her were, much in the same way she used to wonder during the war if a higher power would kindly step in and eliminate the Reapers as a generous favor to her. She had been appropriately chosen as Legate Vakarian’s mentor not for a lack of other candidates — Ashley and two other Spectre veterans had also offered their names as alternates — but because for a woman like Shepard, who held her Spectre title almost exclusively in name until her medical clearance to active service came through, there was now very little for her to do at all.

Shepard didn’t see herself fading into obscurity within political bureaucracy and deskwork. She saw herself fading into obscurity with calculated distance and irrelevance; she saw her name disappearing off the map suddenly without a trace or a warning as she began a new life with a new face; rarely even she could see herself driving a cruiser into the unknown emptiness of dark space, until the fuel ran out and the engine died, like a distant star.

If there were any anchor at all keeping her tethered to her current way of existence, then his name was Garrus Vakarian. He had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, and at present he stood just outside in the corridor. Right now, though, he might as well have been several star systems away.

She did not let herself think about Garrus’s future, or if he saw her in it. 

The cabin doors swept open. “Here.” Garrus tossed her a cotton towel. “I think there’s still some human soap in there from, er… last time.”

She thanked him and headed to pass him. Before she did, his hand reached out, as if to touch hers, but he hesitated just before making contact.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

He asked that far too often. She met his eyes and nodded once. 

“I know the knobs’re a little high. Just shout if you need me to reach the tap.”

She paused — it took a moment to realize he had made a joke — then she snorted despite herself. “I don’t think I’d call you in the shower to reach the knobs, champ.”

His mandibles fluttered a little, and his eyelids dipped low. Lust, or regret? “Maybe next time,” he said.

Her metal foot clicked against the linoleum floor in the bathroom. As she ran the tap, Shepard felt a sudden and overwhelming solidarity with Javik, whom she had last seen at the Forward Operating Base in London, just before the Siege of Westminster. After the war, he had disappeared so thoroughly not even Liara, Hackett, or — she had asked on a whim — Aria T’Loak’s agents had ever managed to pick up a trace. Shepard thought she understood, now, what had driven him to make good on his word to disappear; only time distinguished a soldier without a war between a hero and a relic. Shepard felt with every tired bone within her that she had long crossed that line. Her image was held together by politicians and paparazzi; she often felt the woman herself was held together by several unbidden skin weaves and sheer force of habit.

She realized the shower had been running at steam for several minutes. She held out her hand into the spray as the water warmed.

_Manipulation_ , was the word she had been searching for earlier. It came to her now uninvited. She disliked it more than she disliked resorting to it. And well — part of her hated wanting to stay at all. Shepard was still trying to understand the urge, why she intruded on his space but never shared the full measure of her thoughts, why she could share his body for an hour but not his bed for an evening, or at least not with him in it. She’d had plenty of time to come up with excuses, and indeed the list was strong enough to avoid looking into herself further: _it left more clues for a dedicated observer to piece together; it crossed too many cultural lines;_ perhaps the vaguest of all, _it wasn’t the type of intimacy she was looking for_. But she didn’t know what, exactly, she was looking for. 

The shower was now boiling hot. She stepped in, face turned upright toward the faucet, and embraced it.

* * *

For Shepard, the world ended in July 2187. It ended some time between bleeding out next to Anderson and destroying the Catalyst, after she’d said her goodbyes but before she’d accepted that she wouldn’t be coming back. It had been immediate and painless, and nobody had noticed but her.

It happened in a million ways, but tonight, it was the most familiar: it ended in the forest, where she was one ghost among many.

The woods were dark and cool; the branches were barren and brittle, like skeletons. They swayed, though there was no wind. No animals skittered underfoot; no birds chirped. There were no leaves on the ground to kick up, no trails to follow. A low fog covered the forest floor like a heavy blanket.

Shepard walked. Her movements were sluggish, as though the fog were filled with sand. She’d never been more tired in her life. Each step took effort, but she couldn’t stay still. Despite her solitude, there was something alive in these woods; she wasn’t alone. She was never alone.

Occasionally, she passed signs of old life. A turian skeleton, pale white bones half-buried in the ground. An asari helmet, burnt to black, glass blown out. A human hand, flesh long decayed, trapped high between the fork of two branches.

A sudden chill swept through the forest. Her mouth was dry and made puffs in the air. The fog was low and inviting. If she curled up and slept, she’d go back into the ground; she’d disappear until one day even her ghost was nothing but a memory, and maybe that’s all she was ever meant to be.

Off in the distance, a dull red lit up the sky, like a canvas repainted beyond the trees. Lightning flashed. And then she heard it: the roar of the capital warships, the sound that still struck terror into the back part of her mammalian brain that would always fear the unseen predator. It grew louder and louder until it was a wave of noise that shook the whole forest, a foghorn sounding directly into her brain. Her ears popped; she felt a great pain some place behind her eyes, and something thick and hot dribbled from one nostril down over her chin.

The sound was like something tangible; moving through it was like moving through molasses. It took a herculean effort, but she managed to raise her hand. 

Immediately and completely, the forest quieted, as though she’d pressed on mute. The sudden silence was disorienting; her ears rang. The distant skies burned low orange, pulsing dull flashes of red, like a subdued and stubborn child. 

Her fingers shook. Shepard now looked down at her hand.

Her skin was so thin, she could see straight to her muscles and the machinery that drove them. Her veins were a cross of dark blood and thin, copper-red wiring; her bones a construction of a pale white bone infused with patches of polished steel. As she watched, a wire pulsed; she felt it ripple under her skin like a worm. She felt a gear whirl and click in her elbow as she lowered her arm to her side.

Off in the distance, the Reapers rumbled like impatient giants, waiting for their next instructions.

* * *

Shepard woke suddenly to a tall, dark figure covering something over her. She was curled up to the pillow, shivering violently. It was wet where her head met the pillow; she must have been sweating. She was wearing the thick sleepwear for Alliance marines on a temperature regulated warship, but she might as well have been nude in an ice bath.

“Hi,” Garrus’s voice said quietly from over her. She couldn’t make him out well in the darkness, but she saw him lift up the corner of the quilt he was holding. “You were shivering.”

Shepard nodded; she feared if she opened her mouth, her teeth would chatter.

“I can raise the thermosta — ”

She interrupted, “It’s fine.” To her relief, her voice sounded normal. Not mechanical, not the droning of a Reaper horn; just the low mumble of a tired human woman. “Thanks.”

He paused. “You’re sure you’re not ill?”

“It’ll pass.” God, her knee pained like someone had squeezed it within a vice. She grit her teeth. Her brace was downstairs in her bunk. A trip she made daily, but the thought of walking, of leaving this bed, was impossible.

“You’re sure you don’t…” Garrus sat next to her, at the edge of the bed.

Shepard didn’t respond. It would take minutes to warm again; that seemed an eternity.

The sylvan terrors were among her oldest nightmares, but they remained the most vivid, capitalizing on her feeble human fears of the lurking unknown. They had only grown worse following the Catalyst’s destruction. In her mind, she still walked that wooded purgatory, and in the privacy of her own thoughts, she sometimes let herself wonder which choice she really made, which reality she was really living. She wondered where Commander Shepard’s ghost was these days, after the end of the world.

“Shepard,” Garrus’s voice said quietly in the darkness. “Do you want me to leave?”

She couldn’t find any words for him. But in a moment of weakness, she managed to slip one hand out from under the covers. He grasped it tight with his three warm fingers, and didn’t let go.

 

 

 

III.

After the war, there had been a short length of time during which total anarchy had run rampant and uncontested. That was before the Council had been found dead, and then there was the matter of who would be replacing whom, and then there was the small but passionate faction that believed a formal celebration was in order, likely as an excuse to partake in the stores of recreational alcohol that were no longer contraband.

Unofficially, the formerly designated Citadel space had shrunk to perhaps a dozen systems; with a dramatic drop in marine patrols and Citadel Corps numbers, the colonies in the Terminus, and then the Traverse, and even some on the fringes of Alliance space, became frequent victims of pirate raids and slave trades months before the technicians in the Sol system were able to establish stable comm buoys. Within a year, the new council had been established and the New Citadel had reached a form of functioning stability, revolving in temporary orbit around the Trebia relay, where the Turian Hierarchy and Krogan Freehold forces took the lead in providing ground troops and crisis response teams for surrounding systems. There were far fewer people in the galaxy than a mere year before, but the ratio of criminals running amok had taken a sharp uptick. Which left a lot of cleanup for the few remaining Spectres still breathing air.

Jondum Bau had made it. So had a fair amount of Spectres. When the Reapers struck, the Council had sent out an emergency beacon to its active agents: Spectres would undoubtedly have been prime choices for indoctrination, and so they were ordered to limit their interactions with the general populace to an as-needed basis. As most Spectres preferred to serve independently, remaining isolated from major population centers proved little challenge. The average Spectre’s competency in stealth, cyberwarfare, and cyber defense was made more effective with their natural paranoia and isolation; after the dust had settled, the Council had realized they had, miraculously, managed to retain the majority of their agents. Excluding the infamous case of Saren Arterius, indoctrinated Spectres throughout the war had been extremely rare. Still, Shepard had heard very little from her peers of this category during the war, as she expected to; they were not a chatty bunch on the whole, herself included. This was why it surprised her when many of those who had survived had reached out to Shepard in the immediate aftermath with letters of recognition, thanks, and even the occasional get-well card as she laid on a hospital cot, breathing sluggishly through a tube.

By some unbelievable act of God or nature unbeknownst to her, Shepard fell along the side of the survivors, but of course at the time of her recovery, she heard all of this second-hand. While the galaxy decided if it was going to survive armageddon just to collapse to infighting and greed, Shepard was relearning how to walk, first with stilts, and then a cane. The stilts she grew out of. The cane — a worn but sturdy thing that a nurse found on a sidewalk in Brixton suitable for her height — she still kept for bad days.

Only a handful of N7s survived. A one-to-five ratio of their numbers from before. That did not surprise her: ICT soldiers were bred for combat, for accepting the necessity of sacrificing oneself for the greater good. A part of her suspected she might be the only remaining ICT graduate of her class, but she hasn’t found it in herself to gather the strength to ask.

It was a discouraging statistic, but not wholly unanticipated. The largest blow to the Alliance in this regard would be the future of ICT: the training centers were demolished, but the greater loss was the deaths of individuals qualified to train future ICT candidates. Usually selected from elderly or recommissioned N7s, there were talks of Shepard taking on such a role after her recovery. Shepard had declined before that rumor was able to gain any traction; that position had always been reserved for harsh but kinder souls that resembled Anderson in her mind. Stepping into the role of an N7 mentor, so soon after —

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever be ready. Sometimes all she felt that tied her to that chapter of her life was measured in how well she could recite the old ICT ethos.

_I serve the common man. I do not seek recognition for my actions. I will not fail…_

She’d had the entire creed memorized once; it wasn’t a requirement to wear the designation, but it was expected of graduates anyway. There were jokes, naturally — _Get top marks in every rank, but forget the creed and they’ll knock your ass all the way back to basic —_ but it was never in question that every candidate could recite it in their sleep, not out of discipline, but principle. Several had parts of it tattooed, though rarely for outward display. Shepard had never been inclined, but after James’s own indulgence, she found herself almost wishing she had joined her peers in those trips to the parlor shops amongst the colorful streets of Rio. She found parts of the text easier to forget, the more time passed and the deeper she fell into the realities of her work, the web of Cerberus and the never-ending abyss that had become the Reaper War.

The point was that it had been long enough that what stuck with her now was the last tenet: the one about remembering what you stood for. Why you were still there at all.

Some might think that she wouldn’t need the reminder, but she knew herself better than that.

* * *

The new asari councilor, Irissa, was a surprising choice in appointment after Tevos’s death shortly before the Siege of Westminster. Irissa had emerged from what remained of the Republics high command post-war with an ferocity for sociopolitical activism that had relieved many and irritated several others. Shepard had heard her name in some circles as a worthy tactician and commando, but never considered her one for the drama of political activism, not unlike Shepard herself. Perhaps for that reason Shepard had struck up a surprising but not unwelcome accord with the woman, who seemed to respect, if not like, Shepard as well: they were cut from the same cloth, as Anderson might have once said.

Sparatus had made it out alive, sans an arm and most of his resentment of the Alliance, though the doctors weren’t yet sure if he would ever be fit for office again. As both he and Bau recovered from their injuries in the New Citadel (Bau undoubtedly climbing the walls out of boredom, if Shepard knew him), Irissa had taken over Spectre assignments and Citadel blackops forces. It had been she who had approved Shepard’s overseeing Garrus’s current position on the Parentia, and it would be she who Shepard would be reporting to in the councilor’s shiny new office in the Wedjet Ward if any whiff of the commander’s bias for an old subordinate ended up reaching her ears.

Shepard didn’t hold it against her. She would have expected the same of any agent under her leadership. Same cloth, and all that.

She was writing to Irissa now: a weekly report on Garrus’s progress and capabilities — not that Garrus himself was unaware, he was too sharp to not have some suspicion of what she’d be saying in them, anyway — when an email popped into her inbox. She didn’t recognize the sender domain but knew immediately it was from Ash.

_Skipper -_

_Going to assume you just forgot to reply and that you’re not ignoring me. Heard from Atelopus that Conure is doing well. Good for him. Be good to have another friendly face with us. Certainly plenty for him to do._

_Blue Tiger has been acquired. I’ll be dark for a few days. Javan close._

_I’ll see you back at NC for drinks when all this is over._

_Lorikeet_

The codenames were an old Alliance custom that Shepard and Ashley had both dragged into their Spectre professions mostly out of habit. They were not, perhaps, the most challenging messages to decipher for a dedicated professional that knew Shepard’s inner circle, but since her semi-retirement, Shepard was careful that any sensitive information exchanged through her terminal was coded in duplicate.

Ash had been given charge to operate independently on the leads of several pirates and slavers that had taken advantage of the chaos of war to slip out of their high-risk security prisons. Several of them had approached the Alliance and Hierarchy to offer their services in battle in exchange for pardon following the war; several others were listed as known KIAs. And still others were out there, biding their time, licking their wounds or simply waiting for the new equilibrium to settle before they picked up the familiar trade and continued their old ways.

Javan fell under the latter category. A former batarian commander turned active slave trader, specializing in prostitution rings and acquiring young victims for a higher price. Since escape, he’d slaughtered the last three agents sent after him and left their bodies decapitated, parts cut off and displayed hanging in public places like macabre works of art: an Alliance library on Terra Nova, a turian museum on Rocam, and most chillingly, a preschool on Thessia. A warning to the Council not to try again, undoubtedly.

(He was someone Shepard might have met in another life, had things turned out differently on Mindoir; but she didn’t let herself think about that.)

They didn’t know his real name. The name he was booked under in prison had been revealed to be a fake: _Wogar Kud’dash_ , a perfectly innocent architect that had died while terrainmapping an asteroid some three centuries ago. Ash had suggested the Javan rhino for his renaming, which Shepard found fitting. Solitary, large, deadly, and ferocious when cornered. Soon to be extinct.

They still gave their targets the names of highly endangered or recently extinct animals. Out of hope, or maybe karma, she wasn’t sure which.

From over her shoulder she heard a smug chuckle. “ _Conure_ is not very subtle,” came Garrus’s amused voice.

Shepard would’ve jumped if she had been surprised that Garrus Vakarian became a nosy twerp when he was bored; as it so happened, he had made that all too clear a long time ago. “As a former officer of the law, you know that reading other people’s mail is a felony,” she said idly, eyes still on the screen.

“In Council space,” Garrus said. It was the old _I’m-being-a-brat-and-enjoying-it_ voice, the one that always reminded her that he was a younger brother to some poor soul out there named Solana, who had surely long been sick of her sibling’s antics by the time he reached adolescence. “Last I checked, we still haven’t cleared Sarlik’s orbit. Technically you don’t have any jurisdiction out here either, _ex-Spectre_.”

She refrained from pointing out that she was not an _ex_ anything: decommissioned agents still kept their titles under honorable discharges. But she didn't feel like fighting the point. Shepard clicked out of Ashley’s email. Her unfinished report to Irissa about Garrus was now displayed prominently. The man himself leaned back obediently and observed the bulkhead over them with sudden fascination: he wasn’t so insubordinate that he was willing to threaten his Spectre candidacy, or Shepard’s trust in his professionalism.

“How’d you learn about terrestrial fauna, anyway,” Shepard said conversationally, still typing.

“You can only get addressed as ‘bird’ so many times when you’re booking misdemeanors before you start to wonder what the fuss is about,” Garrus continued idly. Shepard could relate to that. After being called _pyjak_ as often as her title during her first few years of interspecies cooperation, she’d finally given up and checked out _Primate Classes of the Milky Way_ from the Citadel library, just so she would have a leg to stand on when arguing with the next ignoramus who threw the slur into her face.

She wrapped up her memo to Irissa. She had a sudden urge to add a PS, _If you can put up with a smartass, he’ll do just fine_ , but refrained. Better not risk his chances _._

After she pressed Send, Garrus abandoned the pretense of avoiding her terminal. “So I’m here to ask your advice.”

Shepard smirked and swiveled in her chair to face him, steepling her fingers together. She hoped that she looked properly overdramatic, which had the desired effect: he snorted.

“I can’t give you anything that sounds like I’m doing the job for you,” she said, more seriously.

“But you’re allowed to give your opinion,” Garrus said.

“For what it’s worth. Hit me, young padawan.”

“I’m going to assume that’s another human thing. All right: I want to know your thoughts about Ubetzia…”

Shepard listened as Garrus took a seat across from her terminal and explained his plan for the upcoming raid. He would be hitting a small mining station deep in the south pole of a largely abandoned planet in the deep Traverse, toward which they were currently traveling at light speed. The mines had long been known as one of the drug trade’s worst-kept secrets: while the mines themselves made a sizable if adequate profit in the patholium trade, the fumes deep underground were a prime breeding ground for storing for green mercury, a hallucinogen that had risen in popularity since the red sand crackdowns of the late 70’s. Outside of Citadel space, the Council had marked this as an irritable but ultimately backburner task to handle at a later time: green mercury was relatively harmless in comparison to the destructive opioids flooding the market from Omega.

That reputation had changed within the past year as a dangerous version of the drug began surfacing in Citadel space, dubbed “black mercury” after the drug enforcement service saw a change in user behavior. Users now grew increasingly violent against themselves or others under the influence of their visions, only to wake up with no recollection of their actions days later, if they did at all. One notable case Jondum Bau had had to hush up personally involved a turian woman who had chewed off her friend’s arm during the zenith of her psychosis; her friend’s body was found less than a day later, having bled to death in her basement with traces of red sand in her own system.

What Shepard suspected concerned the Council was that the hallucinations of black mercury were controllable. Intel and statistics were limited given the drug’s novelty, so they were flying on Garrus’s specialization and knowledge of the inner workings of the drug trade. It had been an old contact from Omega that had pointed him to Ubetzia. A scenario that he proposed on takeoff was if a terrorist on the other end of the galaxy could craft a batch of polluted product and have it delivered to a distributor in the middle of the Citadel — then mass panic was the least of their concerns. What would terrify the Council was a drug-induced assassination via proxy.

If nothing else, a dangerous drug needed to be eliminated from the market, something Garrus did not need much convincing to see the necessity for action. He felt strongly that Ubetzia was the place to begin his investigation: the mines were a prime breeding and testing ground for experimental drugs given the rich soil from a volcanic ring around the planet’s south pole.

His plan was to have Lt. Elaria, one of the most reliable members of his ground team, approach the administrative offices for a surprise inspection posing as a high-level administrator from corporate, while Garrus snuck into the mine through a shaft ten kilometers from the main entrance. Given the rising popularity of the drug and the fact that all earlier inspections checked out clean, they must have one damned efficient security measure; Garrus suspected the tunnels traveled much deeper into the ground than the official records listed, perhaps by up to fifty miles of underground passages, storing, and venting chambers, to accommodate for rising demand.

“Turians are more susceptible to this thing than anyone else,” Garrus reminded her. Shepard nodded; while the drug affected both levo and dextro organisms, it was notably far more potent to turian physiology for reasons biologists were still trying to determine. She had a suspicion what his question was going to be, but she wanted to hear him ask it. This had to be his mission, his plan, and his choice in every way.

“With a crew full of mostly turians, it seems illogical to ignore an agent that’s not as vulnerable to this thing,” he said after a moment. “But the risk of discovery spikes the more people I bring into this one. This one is just information-gathering. And if my sources are right, it’s a lot deeper than than even most of the employees probably realize. I don’t want to risk anybody getting lost, separated, or trapped down there. Not,” he said hurriedly, “that I think either of us will have trouble getting out if the worst should happen.”

Shepard’s idea of _the worst_ in this scenario would be for the entire mine to collapse on Garrus while he was still down there, but she bit her tongue.

“So your question…” she prompted him.

“Right.” He looked suddenly nervous, but only for a moment. “I guess I’m asking you a few things, then.”

He didn’t elaborate, but Shepard thought she knew what he was asking.

“Thinking of whether to bring me?” She asked. “If it were me…” She paused. “You’ve got your suppressants?”

“We’re fully stocked down in the medbay.”

“I’d bring more than you think you need and go it alone, just you and Elaria on the surface.” She rested her elbows on her knees, hands clasped under her chin as she thought. “Get in, find evidence you need, or evidence it’s not there, and get out. I wouldn’t spend more than six hours on this one.”

“Really,” he said, brows raising. “Not that I was planning to, but…”

“Those workers know the mines better than you do,” she said. “When they’re covering for criminal activity during a surprise inspection, they’ll be extra jittery. The longer you’re down there, the more they’re likely to notice someone’s been in their space. You want to get out before they know you’ve been there. You know how you can tell immediately if someone’s been poking around your terminal?”

Garrus considered her. He seemed to agree by the way his head tilted thoughtfully to the side, but made no move to reply. He just stared at her with those bright blue eyes.

“What?” she asked, feeling somewhat self-conscious. “I always know when someone’s been shuffling around in my stuff.” She twisted her mouth, remembering. “The morning the clone got into my accounts, I knew immediately something was off. I didn’t have time to deal with it before I had to go meet Joker and then shit hit the fan — ”

“That’s not it.” He shook his head. “Thanks. You answered my question.”

Garrus made to rise, but Shepard sat up straight and said, “Wait, that wasn’t all. Tell me what else is bothering you.”

Garrus blinked at her. Now standing again, he towered down over her, blocking the light from the ceiling.

“What do you think of my armor,” he blurted.

Shepard blinked. Whatever she thought he was going to say, it hadn’t been that. “Pardon?”

“It’s not — too flashy, you think?”

It hadn’t really registered. Shepard gave it another look: Garrus was wearing a new suit she hadn’t seen before this mission, a lighter model than his normal battlewear that was made more for stealth, the occasional long infiltration, and impressive boardroom discussions, rather than durability in the line of heavy fire. It was the color of his standard dark blue, with the old silver replaced by a copper-gold trim around the carapace and arms. She had a thought that his old Archangel emblem wouldn’t look out of place on his shoulder pad again.

“Snazzy,” she said. “Looking to make a good first impression with the miners?”

His mandibles fluttered; a sign of amusement. Sometimes nerves. Probably amusement. “For the Council, when I — you know. If I do well. My dad sent it to me.”

“He did?” Shepard hadn’t heard news of Castis Vakarian about his son’s nomination for Specterhood. Of course, she received her news of the Vakarian family through Garrus, and he was as reserved about discussing his family as she was hers. Last she’d heard, the elder Vakarian still loathed the politics surrounding his son’s preferred occupation and might very well consider her the worst influence in Garrus’s career path that had ever come to be. She wouldn’t blame him, not that she had any intention of stopping.

“Well Sol probably picked it out. But he wrote the note. I’d know his handwriting anywhere.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“I suppose.” Garrus fidgeted with his collar, then held up his wrist and rolled it, where his gloves met the sleeves in a flexible clasp. His arm stretched in a way that made her acutely aware of the tall, lithe outline of his profile.

“You never know with him,” Garrus continued. “He’s the type to send a congratulations card after a job promotion just as a way of saying _don’t fuck it up_.”

“A nice suit of armor is a long way just to send a message,” Shepard pointed out. “Maybe it just is what it is.”

He looked at her, left fingers still around his right wrist as he rolled it. “Yeah,” he said distractedly. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”

Shepard blinked. Before she could ask what that meant, Garrus shook his head and waved a hand. “I should get back onto the itineraries for next week. I’ll leave you to it.”

She let him go without more protest, but seconds after he left, she was already regretting not taking the moment to ask him about the — his — well. The newfound habit of kissing her cheek whenever they were alone. Maybe he’d got it out of his system. Now that it’d been some time since his last attempt, drawing attention to it seemed excessive, but…

Shepard signed and turned back to her terminal. Ashley’s email, and her reply. _Read at 16:08PM._

_All right,_ Shepard thought across the galaxy, and to the man now walking just outside her room down the corridor. _Good luck to the two of you._

* * *

That night, there was Ashley. Nude. Defeated. Chained to a grimy, impenetrable cell wall. Her long dark hair was shorn to her skull, bruises stained her olive skin, chain marks on her wrists; she was nearly unrecognizable. But Shepard knew her crew; she knew Ashley’s eyes, Liara’s freckles, Vega’s dimples. She still remembered every inch to Kaidan’s smile.

They kept Spectre Ashley Williams in a tall, narrow room. Thin artificial light streamed in from a grate on the high ceiling. Every so often a wall shifts, and she was passed around outside. Bidders paid high for a Spectre. Others paid high to see one of Commander Shepard’s own broken and used for their abuses; a taste of revenge for Torfan, for Aratoht, just for Ashley’s womanhood. The next best thing to having the Butcher herself.

Javan’s face was among them. It became Balak, the still wanted terrorist of Terra Nova; it became the face of the man who killed her father when he wouldn’t sell his daughter to the invading slavers; it blended into the crowd until it became no one’s at all.

* * *

Shepard woke without warning in a cold sweat. She lay on her bed for several minutes, trying desperately to blink away the images still lingering in her mind’s eye.

Rationale was no counter to her worst fears; they plagued her all the same.

Eventually, Shepard pushed herself to her feet and shivered her way to the communal shower. Blasted the water to the highest heat. Did not remove her clothes when she stepped in and let herself be drenched, from head to toe.

 

 

 

IV.

The morning before they touched down on Ubetzia, Shepard fucked Garrus into the bed so hard she saw stars before she came. They were t-minus two hours before landing, and Garrus should really be getting going, she’d sworn to herself on her life that this _whatever-this-was_ wouldn’t stand in the way of his mission, but Jesus —

She came in a shuddering, messy rush. Her thighs were trembling. Garrus’s chest rose and fell; she heard his breaths louder than she felt her heart pounding in her chest.

He was nearly done. She dug her fingers into the hide of his waist, where the ridges of his plates made natural fingerholds, and pulled herself on deeper. Garrus groaned low and deep, eyes still closed. Shepard felt sweat drip down the side of her forehead. She had one eye on the nightstand clock.

_C’mon, Garrus. Finish here and then go out there and do me proud. Then come back to me and we’ll do it all over again._

“C’mon,” she said out loud. Her eyes were closed again. Closed, she could pretend that there was no timer, that her influence was not detrimental to his potential, that she was not ruining every inch of his honorable turian discipline that she could get her hands on out of her own selfish desire to feel another living person touch her without harm. “In ten hours you’re going to have your case and go home a big damn hero. Make this one good. For the road.”

His eyes cracked open. He grinned up at her, shakily, like a teenager during his first time. “You make it all sound so easy.”

“It is easy,” she panted. “Just do exactly what I do and say exactly how I do and say it. You’ll be done in no time.”

He laughed, but he was out of breath; it came out a bit like a wheeze. “Yeah,” he rumbled. “Big damn hero. Soon enough you’ll have to share me with all the bachelorettes on the Citadel.”

“Mm.” She panted. One hour and forty-seven minutes. “That what you’re into?”

“Shepard, please,” he murmured, “I’m a man of class.”

This was somehow hilarious to hear with him buried to the hilt inside of her and fifteen minutes late to meet Lucret on the bridge; she grinned. “Men of class don’t consider sleeping with half the galaxy something on their to-do list.”

Garrus’s cock twitched inside her. “How would you know,” he panted.

“Am I at least still there, in this fantasy of yours?” The words came out without thought, natural banter; she didn’t know what possessed her to ask, but she was suddenly driven by an intense, strange yearning to know. “You and I with all those people?”

Then suddenly she saw only his neck: his face was skyward, fringe digging into the headboard. Shepard felt his nails tight around her thighs but she only had eyes for his collarbones, and the leathery hide of his neck that he displayed so rarely; distantly, she registered this as a sign of submission and trust in turians.

She pushed this aside to pick apart later.

Garrus came back to himself with an hour and forty-five minutes to spare. Shepard was already standing. She smelled like sweat and sex — and turian pheromones, certainly — but Garrus would need the restroom first.

As he showered, she collected his new suit from the armor locker. Something suddenly possessed her to trail her fingers along the copper-gold trim. It was harder than it looked. She remembered vaguely that silver and copper were indications of status in the Hierarchy, but she couldn’t remember what each meant. He hardly wore silver anymore, ever since the war; mostly the neutral blue and black common of all turian military.

Had his father meant this as a compliment? Would he be proud to wear it in public when he had to?

When Garrus stepped out of the shower, she presented him with the polished chestplate and his boots. Shepard watched him silently as he thanked her; the shower seemed to have subdued him somewhat. She wondered if he was nervous about the upcoming mission, or simply chastened after having realizing his tardiness. She should feel guilty too, really — all of her rules about carefulness and making sure her impact in his candidacy was for the better, broken — but all she felt now was a desire to make him as ready as possible.

It occurred to her that for all the times they’d done this, she’d never watched him dress before.

Legate Vakarian declared himself ready an hour and a half before they were set to dock at port. Lucret was likely stewing in the CIC two floors below them, but she’d be too polite to say anything so long as Garrus turned up before the pilot announced descent.

In the meantime, Shepard would shower, and would wait to emerge until the crew was preoccupied with landing.

“Hey,” she said finally when he made to move toward the door.

He glanced back at her, one hand still doing the clasps of his gloves. “You all right?”

“Don’t die out there,” was all she said. It seemed somehow important to say this, to hear him confirm it, like a promise she needed him to make. And God, wasn’t that weird. He wasn’t made of glass; he had been through far worse than this, had the scars on his face to prove it. But her absence on this mission was suddenly glaringly apparent only now; she wondered if he would miss her at his side while he was down there.

Garrus’s eyes softened. “You know me, Shepard. I’ll be good.”

She nodded.

“I’ll keep the comm when I can. Even if I don’t reply, I’ll hear you.”

This was treading a little too close to patronizing for her tastes. _Shut this down,_ her gut was telling her. She nodded stiffly. “Good luck, then.”

He left, and despite everything — that this was what she’d wanted and encouraged, that this was what she’d been working for over the past year, that he deserved this — Shepard couldn’t shake the feeling of being left behind.

* * *

Shepard was in the canteen half an hour before landing, helping herself to a quick breakfast of reconstituted waffles and strawberry syrup that was at least three years out of date. She skimmed her tool as she ate. Two days and no word yet from Ash, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary. She’d never said how long she’d be going dark.

A three-fingered hand came into her vision, setting down a tray on the table in front of her.

Shepard blinked. Azymadus, the elderly, good-natured cook, was wiping his hands down with his apron. His cream-white plates were weathered and cracked below his red colony markings.

“Heard birthdays are something special for humans.” He flicked his good mandible at her. The other had been blown off sometime during the war; Shepard had never heard of anyone getting him comfortable enough to tell the story. With a row of teeth exposed on his right side, he looked almost skeletal with his bone-like plates, but his tapered yellow eyes were kind.

Shepard looked down at what he’d placed in front of her. A crude, but recognizable cupcake, with white frosting and a yellow base. Buttercream? Lemon?

…. _What_ day did he say it was?

“My birthday,” was all Shepard said.

“The Chief mentioned something ‘bout it,” he said vaguely. _Chief_ being the translation for an old Hierarchy slang for captain or commander. Garrus. “Sorry it’s been a little sparse for levo rations ‘round here lately. Miscalculated stock. We’re stocking up at the next shore leave, soon as the boss is done here. I’ll make sure to update the requisitions.”

“Thank you,” she said, because it was the polite thing to say. Her throat choked around it.

“Hey.” Azymadus peered down at her. Those catlike eyes watched her, curious or concerned or prying, what was the difference. “You good there?”

“Fine.” She peeled the wrapping back and took a bite. It really was a fine pastry, for the limited inventory. Buttercream. When was the last time someone had remembered her birthday? When was the last time she had remembered?

How had _Garrus_ known?

“Thank you,” she said again when she was finished. She vaguely realized that she had just scarfed down the entire thing in front of his eyes, just to avoid the humiliation of carrying it around the ship and being peppered with questions or looks by the crew. _What is that? Human food? You know you’re not meant to bring edibles outside the canteen._ Or even worse — _Happy birthday, Shepard._

“If only my grandkids ate what I put in front of ‘em like that,” Azymadus grunted.

Shepard nodded sympathetically. She was starting to feel a small tightness in her esophagus, the trademark sign that she had eaten too fast. “You have grandkids?” she managed to say.

He paused. His long, thin hands were back in his apron, wiping his wrinkled fingers though they were already clean. “Did,” he said eventually. His eyes seemed to lose their warmth, and he turned to head into the kitchen. “Tell the Chief I said good luck today.”

* * *

Thilma, the young pilot, was on the speakers announcing twenty till the LZ. The Parentia would be making use of the local delivery landing zone. It was normally reserved for automated drop-offs by drone and the shuttles, so theirs was likely the largest ship the ground staff had ever seen grace humble Ubetzia. Garrus would be making use of a modified version of Shepard’s old Savant X, hitching a ride while cloaked onto the local ground transport in and out of the tunnels. At the same time, Elaria would be approaching the entrance center for the “inspection” and inevitably stalled by the admin there.

Deciding to infiltrate with the ground cargo, Garrus wanted to see exactly what the miners saw, he had reasoned, learn the way they entered and exited, if they did at all. The mines were so deep into the mountainsides and covered by at least seven different atmospheric radiation shields that limited communication bandwidth and thermal readings to the surface. Anyone lower than thirty meters wasn’t making a peep, which would be concerning enough even without his added suspicions about the drug trade.

Far as Garrus could reason, about ninety percent of the workers lived down there; slave labor was his working theory. By the will of the Council, it was a secondary objective, but if he was able to obtain proof, then the parameters of the mission would change immediately; he was to report back to Shepard — and through her, the Council — with his findings. After that, Irissa had made clear that the decision to engage, and how, would be theirs.

Shepard hadn’t yet fully unpacked the weight of this possibility. She’d resolved to cross that bridge if they came to it, though the more she thought about it, the more her gut resisted. How to evacuate what might be thousands of slave workers below the surface without Citadel support, how to ensure they would get the help they needed with the state of the galaxy the way it was?

“ _There must be bunkers, and steady stream of food_ ,” Garrus’s voice said over the link. He was thinking aloud; a nervous habit. He must not have reached the transport depot yet.

In the comm room, Lucret leaned forward. She, Shepard, and Garrus’s two systems and tactical officers were seated in a half-circle facing the QEC which sat at the center of the table. Undoubtedly inspired from the blueprints of the Normandy after the Alliance impounded the SR2, the tech installers of the Parentia had set the ship’s VI to appear in the form of a nebulous pale red orb. At least it didn’t talk unless she asked it to; times when it did, Shepard was reminded just a little too strongly of EDI.

Beyond the floating QEC holo on the opposite wall was a black vidscreen, which Quernus, the tech officer, was currently setting up to the feeds of the administrative offices at the front of the preparation plant on the planet below. With a grunt and a muttered “Finally,” he got the screen to finally click: they had feed.

Elaria was approaching the under the guise of a woman from Palaven; the ship’s physician, who doubled as a needler in case the crew required a touch-up, had given her dark blue colony markings that stretched from her chin and rose up to curve the edges of her mandibles and eyes like a blossom.

On screen, she entered the door. The camera was located in the corner of the room facing the main desk, so her small frame looked tilted, like they were viewing her from a curious bird’s eye view. “ _Hello_ ,” came her distant tinny voice. “ _No need to look at your appointment book, you weren’t expecting me. My name is Selvania Merte, I’m with HR on Ilium…_ ”

“The camera’s facing the staff,” Lucret muttered to herself. Shepard nodded; she had noticed too.

Lucret set the vid volume to low, and nodded to Quernus, who would be following Elaria’s progress in case she ran into trouble. If she did manage to succeed in convincing the office team that a tour inspection was necessary, they didn’t expect her to be brought lower than the thirty-meter mark expected to cut off comms; the staff wouldn’t risk a mark against their safety and emergency protocols if the inspector couldn’t access a local com buoy, or indeed any galactic network or audio connection, when they brought her underground.

Quernus monitored her on the vid while Shepard, Lucret, and the strategy and tactics officer huddled around the QEC. Garrus was silent on the other line; he must have reached the station. The transports were operated almost exclusively by VI, which was in a way almost worse than organic workers; they’d be more likely scan him. But they wouldn’t be scanning for therma signatures, or so Garrus’s theory went: they’d be looking for heat signatures of people smuggling _out_ of the mines, not in.

A small ping: Garrus had sent a text message. It appeared on the small screen display below the QEC.

_Caught a transport. 160KM/HR. Large boxes above, bigger than mining eqptmt. Impossible to tell what’s in them._

Shepard knew exactly what was going through Garrus’s mind: Were the crates containing simply nutrient paste, or hardened rations and water, or cooking equipment, or chemical deliveries? Garrus was a dog with a bone when he caught onto a theory: he’d shake his target until something came loose. She prayed he’d restrict his curiosity to unobtrusive scans, and not risk getting caught by opening any himself.

On screen, Elaria had managed to convince the secretary that she was a legitimate employee of M-YISE Gorlek-Tino Energy, thanks largely due to a set of fake employee and corporate Illium IDs Garrus had forged himself. 

Garrus, on the screen: _Inside. DZ at 28m._

Shepard had once thought a QEC an exorbitant expense for a ship made after wartime like the Parentia, but she had a sudden, immense appreciation for it in this moment. Not only could information between the quantum particles linked to their CIC and Garrus’s tool travel instantaneously without regard for distance or the reliance of buoys, but their communications couldn’t be intercepted. No possibility of a wiretap from any suspicious ears down below.

Garrus provided the occasional comment on the architecture (old but well maintained), and state of the air (thick but breathable; his tool was running air quality scans that wouldn’t be done for another hour at minimum) but he kept radio silence after making the ride down the mineshaft. Shepard wasn’t concerned. She was waiting for whatever he’d find down below the thirty-meter mark.

Meanwhile on the vid screen, Elaria looked to be in deep conversation with an older turian; from a glance, everything about his posture as he read _superior manager_. Apparently the secretary had called her boss to deal with the strange woman demanding an inspection of the premises. At the very least, if she wasn’t allowed onsite, then Elaria would be gathering everything she could about the daily schedule, monthly quotas for the fiscal year, common visitors, and employee retention. Inside the comm room, at the side of one of the table wings, Quernus’s eyes were glued to the screen, tracking every move she made.

“Anyone want a snack?” The last strategy officer — Yelfra? Yalta? Something like that — looked up expectantly, like the four of them were sharing an inside joke. Shepard knew him to be a bit of a smartass, and Garrus had warned her multiple times not to introduce him to the fruitful world of human idioms lest they never hear the end of his bad jokes, but he looked up to Garrus, and he had tact when it counted.

“There’s graxen in the canteen,” Lucret said without looking up from her datapad.

“I didn’t think we’d be sitting back for this one,” Yelfra/Yelta said. “Why d’you think — ?”

“Because he’s the boss,” Quernus said. He seemed to have very little patience for his fellow officer. He was still watching Elaria on the screen.

“Was it like this when he was with you?” the officer asked. “ _Turned tables_ , is that the phrase?”

It took Shepard a moment to realize that he was speaking to her. “No,” she said. “He was a member of my ground team.”

“Did you go on a lot of solo missions? As a Spectre?”

_We have a deep cover operative out in batarian space… Go in with discretion, or don’t go at all._

“No.”

“That’s uncommon, isn’t it?”

Shepard was starting to uncharitably hope that he’d take a hint and shut up; she felt a strong solidarity with Quernus. “I suppose so.”

On her wrist came a faint buzz from her omnitool: she’d received a message. She rolled up her sleeve and glanced at it discreetly: _Unknown Sender_. Ash…?

Something heavy settled in the pit of her stomach, but this guy was still asking her more _goddamn_ questions.

“If the captain gets Spectrehood, I suppose we’ll all get reassigned,” Yelf-something continued vaguely, apparently having lost interest in Shepard’s history. Garrus’s nomination to Special Tactics was the ship’s worst-kept secret: if it wasn’t obvious from his track record with the Council, the not-so-subtle public hint to Vakarian’s service and possible future serving both the Hierarchy and Citadel space in the previous year’s State Address by Primarch Victus, then Shepard’s presence on the Parentia would definitely have made it clear what role he was currently under for consideration.

“Not necessarily,” Lucret said from Shepard’s right, surprising her. Her eyes still haven’t moved from her datapad, where she looked to be reviewing thermal clip inventories, but Shepard knew she had both ears and one eye trained on the QEC in case Garrus made contact. “Spectres operate independently mostly by choice, but some have a history of teaming up. Rena and Ulaxi were operative partners for centuries.”

“I meant the crew,” the strategist said. “How many keep their teams intact?”

“At least one,” Lucret said dryly, gesturing with one hand to Shepard, who was sitting between them.

On the line, Garrus was still quiet. The message on her wrist buzzed once again, as if she hadn’t noticed it the first time.

“Yeah, but she was a special case. The Council needed a whole crew to go after Arterius and the geth. Who knows what Vakarian’s getting assigned. Then it’s back to the roster queue for the rest of us — ”

Shepard still hadn’t shaken that unsettling pit in her stomach. Her thoughts drifted uneasily between Garrus’s silence on the line and the unread message hovering below her sleeve. Was Ash in trouble? Forty-one hours was under half the time she’d expected to hear from her before bringing her target in. Was she calling for help? But she hadn’t sent it via a priority channel. Probably just an update. What would convince her to reach out while she was still dark?

She was meant to stay available to her mentee whenever he was in the field, on the possibility Garrus ran into something he couldn’t handle and she would be called in to see the mission to completion. She considered that a last resort; another break-in had a risk of tipping off the mining staff.

Shepard shook herself out of the haze of her thoughts. “What capacity did you serve in the war, Lieutenant?” she asked the strategist beside her.

“Me?” He blinked, startled, reminding her a bit of an owl as he did so. “I was under Primarch Wequet. Twelfth Fleet.”

“Ground force?”

“No, ma’am.” He flicked a mandible at her; his mannerisms were different than Garrus’s, but she had the impression he was giving her a turian equivalent of a sheepish grin. “Lost both feet and my hearing in my left ear when the first wave hit Menae. Got reassigned immediately to the Primarch’s personal team on the HR Magnete.”

The QEC flared a dull red in front of them and Garrus’s voice appeared over the link without any other warning. “Found a saferoom.” He sounded a bit puzzled. “No idea what they imagine it’s for, but it doesn’t appear on any sca — ”

He broke up. Lucret frowned and reached forward to wake up the VI, but then they heard his voice again: it was barely intelligible.

Garrus’s voice faded back into her earpiece like an old radio; it came in bursts, then silence, and the finally, a steady, familiar stream of words. “— place goes down deeper than our maps indicated. I won’t have time to search it all, but the bright side is I blend in. Nobody removes their helmet, but they’re also not big on nametags down here. I’m finding an overseer.”

Presumably to find a detailed layout of the mine. _That’s a big risk,_ Shepard wanted to say. _There are other options —_ But even as she thought it she knew to hold her tongue; this was Garrus’s mission. If he thought hacking the foreman records was the best course of action, she’d have to trust him.

She swallowed her concern and asked, “Defenses?”

“Picking up some heavy turrets about fifty meters below me. They’re hiding something.”

“Or keeping something in?”

“Both, is my guess,” he said grimly. “Going dark.”

This was more than backdoor drug experimentation, then. Either that, or the cooks were damn paranoid, and fabulously wealthy; what kind of underworld chemists would choose to do their work in the dingy tunnels of Ubetzia if they could afford funding for labs offworld?

She should’ve reminded him to keep checking his filters for sulfuric gas. And his voice mixing program, in case he was asked for identification.

If anything happened to him, she’d never forgive herself.

_Christ, it’s a simple infiltration. He’s not diffusing a bomb._

You never knew, though.

_Don’t I? He’s an adult. He can handle himself._

Like you handled yourself in those tunnels on Torfan?

_He’s not a twenty-four year-old idiot._

No, he’s just had you holding his hand for half a decade. If he dies, it’s a mark against your leadership. It’s on _you_.

The thing was that Garrus didn’t have to die by the hands of paranoid trigger-happy black mercury scientists to justify the panic that was slowly gathering in her chest. All he had to do was get crushed by a miner’s skip, or trapped in a chute, or caught by one of the patrols, and dragged underground to where they kept their slave labor where they’d install a chip into his skull and put him to work and he’d never see daylight again —

She felt her heart racing, but could do nothing to calm it; she might as well learn to fly. In her mind’s eyes, she saw what Garrus must be seeing: long tunnels that stretched onto forever, an anthill of false leads and no end in sight, a darkness that swallowed you whole. Sickly yellow light from the flickering bulbs that dangled overhead on exposed wires; shadows around every corner that could be anyone, or anything.

She heard the admiral’s voice in her ear, static hissing over a sharp, desperate baritone. _Lieutenant — Kyle’s been recovered. You’ve been promoted. Don’t argue with me. Your orders are to see this through. The Alliance will not tolerate another loss against these animals. Do you understand?_

The sound of her own breathing inside her helmet, louder than her footsteps. _Some units are reporting surrenders, sir. Defectors._

_You have your orders, soldier._

On her right, Lucret was saying something. She couldn’t make out the sounds; all she heard was the hissing and clicking of turian speech, the murmur of batarian extremists just around the bend, as though her translator had been suddenly cut off.

Shepard rose to her feet and said aloud, “‘Scuse me.” She heard herself as though she were talking behind a mask: muffled, low. Her voice sounded so human — vulnerable. A predator would take advantage of weakness immediately. She had to get out of here. Had to find a rock to hide under, had to stop her hands from shaking, had to breathe.

Someone said something in response, but she didn’t hear; her ears were full of cotton, head was full of gnats. She blinked and black spots swam across her vision. Once she was in the hallway and the doors had clicked behind her, she remembered distantly that she wasn’t meant to leave the comm room while Garrus was on duty — call her a bad mentor, then. Shit, she was already fucking her mentee. Hah! Fuck. _Fuck!_ She’d forgotten about that. They’d have her badge. She’d be out on the streets again. She’d never make N7.

Goddammit, you pathetic shit. This is nothing. Get yourself together.

She somehow made her way to the bathroom. She passed a crewmember that looked at her alarmingly as she stumbled once, against the wall. She registered vaguely that must look quite terrible to elicit visible shock from a turian.

Her knees felt weak, though she knew she must’ve only walked just down the hall. She found the restroom and clung to the edges of the sink, and closed her eyes. When she felt that she could stand without the benefit of help, she leaned down, splashed water onto her face, under her eyes. She hissed as it hit her skin; her cheeks felt hypersensitive, tingling.

She opened her eyes, finally, and the spots that dotted her vision were gone. All she saw was a steel counter and tiled floor. But in the mirror —

Ah.

She traced the scars that ran from the corner of her right eye down to her jawline. Small drops of fresh blood had welled just underneath the skin weave, and when the light hit it, her cheek looked like a network of softly glowing veins. The leftover scars on her face where the skin connected from Miranda’s Frankenstein project had always made Shepard feel a bit of a poorly-designed patchwork doll. She was reminded precisely why she preferred not to look in mirrors anymore.

She wiped her face down with a biodegradable napkin and recycled it in the bin. Stretched the corners of her eyes. No shadows or ghosts or boogeymen appeared from around the corner stalls.

Now that she was alone, all she could feel was embarrassment. She should be back there for Garrus. She’d sworn to herself she’d see this through. But the thought of seeing and being seen by others in this moment was paralyzing. She just needed another moment.

Shepard thumped her back against the wall and slid to the floor. Knees gathered in front of her, arms around her legs, she waited for her heart to calm. It beat like a drum, _whum-whum-whum_ , and some days, that might annoy her, but now, it felt okay. She forced herself to listen to it, reminded herself that there were millions and billions others who didn’t get to have this anymore. She felt like the eye of a storm; not trapped or lost within it, but the moment of calm before the wind picked up and the seas arose and the hurricane told her to get back to work. That was her.

Of course, some people never saw the end of the storm, much less manage to escape it. And others didn’t get a choice when they got caught up within her radius. She liked to think some people had come out of it for the better, having known her, but she knew herself and her reputation too well to believe it a majority.

She was staring at her knees when her gaze drifted to her wrist, and in a flash she remembered the unknown message that had reached her tool not half an hour ago. Her fear of it seemed inconsequential now. She opened the holo and navigated to her inbox.

_Skipper —_

_Well you’ve probably heard by now. I’m taking an early trip back to the NC and hoping I can convince Irissa not to shelve me for the next century. Hope Garrus’s mission is a success. If you’ll be around the ward soon and feel like cheering up your old LT, give me a call so I can out-drink you again._

_AW_

Shepard paused. No codenames. Was she pulled off the mission? Compromised? “Probably heard by now”? There was no weekly Spectre digest that she knew of. She scanned the rest of her mail: there was nothing from Bau or the asari councillor, but then they didn’t usually share the status of other operatives. Perhaps Ashley thought she was on better terms with them than she was.

She typed back, _What happened?_

No point waiting for a response now; whatever it was, Ashley sounded more irritated than upset. She’d probably waste a day beating up a punching bag, then get back to her mail later.

In the meantime, Shepard had wasted too much time feeling sorry for herself. She stood, feeling a bit stabler, checked herself in the mirror — the scars were still irritated, but had stopped bleeding — and took a deep breath. Then she left the room.

Whatever Ashley’s story was, it sounded as though Javan the slave trader was still at large. That would need dealing with, but her first priority was Ashley’s status. The panic that had gripped her heart had still not entirely settled, but the fact that she was conscious and typing, at least — and looking forward to a round of alcohol — was an obviously good sign. Nothing else for it but to wait, she supposed; none of Javan’s identifications would appear in extranet searches for news.

_Problem two_ , she thought to herself as she headed back to the comm room. _Garrus._

Garrus was not the problem, she corrected; who she was in relation _to_ Garrus was the problem. The strength and immensity of her feelings overwhelmed and confused her. Was it dependency, or just fondness turned into overexposure? She was so far gone she couldn’t even tell if she was advising him objectively as she should be — but even that was avoiding the more glaring problem.

The Hierarchy cared little for whom Garrus took to bed, and the Alliance wasn’t allowed to give a rat’s ass about her business anymore — but the Council would certainly have a thing or two to say about a Spectre sleeping with the candidate she was meant to be evaluating. To help him where he was going, to be who Garrus needed her to be, Shepard could no longer continue as they had. That was the crux of it: something had to give.

What was Garrus imagining? Spectrehood, a shiny badge, and a future filled with a career of chasing bad guys and seeing his face in news terminals? She wasn’t sure if she wanted that. But who cared what she wanted? What was Garrus imagining after he accepted that elevation? Where was her place in that vision?

Yeah. Long-term partners in this business weren’t unheard of. The thing was that Spectres lived short lives, and relationships born out of gunfire and wartime lasted even shorter. Was that what this was? Was he expecting it to continue, after they succeeded here? Was this all moot and pointless woolgathering, and would he turn to her as soon as he was sworn in and grin and say say _Thanks, Shepard_ , and pat her on the back and head off to his shiny new life alone?

These thoughts kept her company as she made her way back down the hall. She slipped back into the comm room with little fanfare. On screen, the camera view of the secretary’s desk had switched to a long, low tunnel with a row of large windows along one side. Elaria was standing smartly, nodding at whatever the personnel was saying as they gestured to the display behind the window; the superior from before was off to the side, looking irritable. Apparently she had convinced them to allow her a tour of the plant.

The strategy officer had joined Quernus at the front of the room under the vid screen, where they were following Elaria on audio. Quernus had two terminals and his tool open to full-screen display in front of him. On it appeared to be statistics of the company history, investments, locations, and profits — in case Elaria’s studies of the company’s history failed her and she was questioned on the fly.

New messages had appeared on Garrus’s comm link. Shepard took her seat and peered to read them. Lucret shot her a look but fortunately remained silent.

She had been gone longer than she realized. Over the past fifteen minutes Garrus had been busy: according to the log he had found an overseer’s tool, copied its contents, and among them found a map of the top layer of the branch of the tunnels he was currently in.

_Three branches_ , he wrote. _Five levels. Each level abt 100m. Each cartel gets a branch. I think they rotate. No telling how many there are in all._

“Any update on the workers?” Shepard asked. She thanked whatever higher power might exist that her voice sounded normal to her own ears again.

“Almost definitely slave labor,” Lucret said. “Elaria’s been asking about retention and personnel costs but the foreman won’t give a straight answer. Though the captain hasn’t confirmed yet. I doubt he’ll find a roster log of the colonies they’ve raided for their workforce sitting out in the open. But it seems obvious.”

Operating on guesswork, even strong guesswork, from Lucret was oddly out of character. Not unlike Lawson, Shepard’s impression of her was a woman who worked solely on what she had confirmed. Shepard glanced over at Lucret. She looked calm on the outside, but she knew how to read stress in Garrus’s frame, and she saw a hell of tension in the woman sitting beside her.

She wondered if Garrus had ever had that talk with his XO about taking a break every now and then.

“Any sign of batarian influence?” Shepard asked.

“Mostly human, salarian, turians. The occasional quarian — but I doubt they last long down there. Can’t imagine they’re prime worker material.” Lucret’s mandibles flattened to her face. Pissed or just plain uncomfortable, Shepard didn’t know her well enough to tell. “Not to speak poorly of an entire race.”

“I understand.”

“It’d be naive not to rule out Hegemony influence here,” Lucret continued. “This place was being funded almost exclusively by offworld batarian investors until the war. Now… I’m not sure. It’s expensive to keep a workforce this large. Unless you don’t pay for labor.”

Shepard paused before asking, “You have a history with batarian slavers, LC?”

“Everyone has a history with batarians these days, Commander,” she said tightly.

Shepard didn’t reply.

“Sorry,” Lucret said tightly after a minute. Her voice was high, mandibles flat to her face, and Shepard had the impression she was avoiding her eyes by refusing to look up from her datapad. “…A lot of my extended family was taken when I was twelve. I thought the captain mentioned.”

“He didn’t,” Shepard said. “And I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No. I assumed it was common knowledge.” Lucret appeared to realize something, because she swallowed and suddenly looked up with startled brows. An apologetic look? Shepard had never seen her so flustered. “Forgive me. You’re from Mindoir, aren’t you?”

Before Shepard could respond — or pointedly refuse to respond at all — a message ticked over the QEC.

_I have all I’m getting. Returning to LZ. Confirm receipt._

Shepard blinked. That was fast — she had expected him to be down there for hours more.

“Acknowledged,” Lucret said over the line.

They wouldn’t be getting anything else out of Garrus until he was within range of the ship again, so they kept watch over Elaria, who was being shown what looked like several different kinds of ores the mine produced behind a thick glass screen. She had been prepared to keep the facade for up to five or six hours, depending on how the infiltration team went; it seemed abrupt to pull her out now, so Lucret told Quernus to have her remain for another hour until the tour wrapped itself up naturally. Shepard had to give her credit: Elaria looked quite believable as a HR representative on the screen, in the proudly detached way that only an administrative assistant being paid to care could pretend to be invested about the seventeen different methods of mining patholium.

“After we’re done here,” Lucret said suddenly, “will you accompany the captain on future assignments?”

Shepard blinked at her. “It depends on the Council. If their physician decides I’m still not ready for fieldwork, it doesn’t really matter.”

Lucret shot her a strange look; almost sarcastic, as though she had made a joke. “Sure. But if you had a preference on ship assignments, they would consider it.”

Shepard snorted. She’d never known the council to weigh her opinion very highly, but it seemed out of place to mention that here. “Maybe if I caught them in the right mood. Why do you ask?”

“The crew’s wondering where they’ll be reassigned after the captain’s done with the Parentia,” Lucret said frankly. “I don’t imagine Hierarchy will let him keep it after he transfers to Council governance, but they did make an exception for the Normandy. So that’s been floating through some rumors.”

Shepard sensed a question in there — then something clicked. “You’re wondering if there’s a chance Garrus will remain on the Parentia, or if he’ll leave to partner as a Spectre with me?”

“In a sentence.”

Confronted with hearing her vague thoughts confirmed by somebody else, Shepard didn’t know how to respond. “If he’ll keep me along, I suppose.”

Lucret didn’t seem to think Shepard was taking her seriously. “Why wouldn’t he? He thinks highly of you,” she said. Without another word, she turned back to her datapad.

Shepard, lost for how to respond to that, decided not to say anything at all. And in that way they waited together in the silence until the transmission came to an end.

* * *

Shepard made certain she wasn’t in the CIC when Garrus gave the debrief. She was in her cabin, calling Ashley; of the swirling mixture of leftover tension and discontent simmering within her, this bundle of nerves seemed like the more manageable problem that she felt equipped to handle at the moment.

“I can’t talk about it over the line,” Ashley said. She had refused to video call — slightly alarming, though Ashley had unconvincingly waved it off on her poor reception. “Needless to say, it got cut short. I’ll say the rest in person.”

Shepard was jumping to worst-case scenarios here. Had she given bad advice on approaching batarian hostage situations? Compromised her friend, risked a life that wasn’t hers? “Anything I can do from here?”

“No, Skipper,” Ashley sighed. It crackled over the line. “Somehow I knew you were going to ask that.”

“Force of habit.”

“If you’re really interested, join me for a beer on Zakera. I’ll tell you _all_ about it.” She didn’t sound excited; in fact she sounded rather reserved.

Shepard twisted her lips. “I’m not sure. I think Garrus’s mission just got more complicated. Not sure how long it’ll be till he’s done.”

“No dice with Ubetzia?”

“He’s giving the debrief downstairs now. I’ll pick his brain about it later. It’s really his call on how to address it — ”

“But you can’t help yourself,” Ashley joked.

Shepard felt slightly indignant. “I am not bossing him around. This is his assignment.”

“I know, just yanking your chain.”

“Just,” Shepard felt obliged to say, “if it were me, I’d press — ”

“I _get_ it, Shepard,” Ashley said. To her surprise, Ashley didn’t sound facetious anymore; her voice was softer. Sympathetic. “It’s hard to let go.”

The silence that followed was not uneasy, but not quite comfortable either. Shepard wasn’t prone to poetics, but maybe this was why she felt so gravitated toward Ashley in times of career doubt: she could put words to the fears and thoughts of failure that swam in Shepard’s mind unnamed and unchallenged. Hearing it said aloud gave her problems reality, but also made them lighter. It never made her feel better; it never would. But she did feel less alone.

“Chakwas clear you yet?” Ashley changed tactics. It was concern, and also a disguise at concern, because Shepard knew what she was really asking: _You going to be back in action soon?_

“Ah,” Shepard said.

“Everything okay?”  
  
“Might’ve skipped my last few appointments.”

“On purpose?”

“Mm.”

“Come on, Shepard.”

“I’ve got a valid excuse,” Shepard said. “Communications are spotty. I’m helping protect the galaxy.”

“Doesn’t your leg need monthly maintenance or something for the first two years? To make sure it installed right?”

Shepard wasn’t sure where Ash had heard that; nevermind that she was correct, Shepard was starting to feel about defensive, wishing the topic of her health would somehow go away on its own.

“I can do most of it myself,” Shepard said. Partial lie. “And there’s a doctor on board.” Not a lie. But the Parentia’s medical officer was also not a licensed biomedical engineer. So: a lie in spirit. Sue her.

“Hey,” Ashley said over the line; with her tone, Shepard imagined her raising her hands in surrender. “I’m not on your case. I’m just making sure. It was just…” She hesitates, as though she’s not certain whether to finish her sentence. “Spotty. For a while.”

Shepard was struck silent again; discussing that time in the hospital, those months in limbo, was not something she ever did, if she could help it.

“…I know,” she said finally. _You don’t have to remind me. I know it was rough. I know I was in bad shape._ But it was a lie: Shepard didn't know; nobody had ever said it to her face. She’d only come to understand her condition in those first few months after the war ended by what she’d parsed together later. _When they found you — I don’t know. But you made it. — God, Shep. You had us a little worried, you know? Just a little. — Hey. God. Sorry. I’m not going to cry on my commanding officer. I’m just — it’s good to see you._

And there was what Garrus had said to her, done for her…

“Anyway,” Ashley said now, quieter, as though she now regretted raising the topic at all. “It’s a shame you can’t come. I think I’ll be on the New Citadel for a while, though, so connection should be better. Going to sit down with Bau and Irissa to regroup and replan. We’ll figure this one out.”

“Don’t say if you can’t,” Shepard said, grateful for the change in subject, “but was it bad intel? Or just luck?”

Ashley hesitated before responding. “Bit of both, I suppose.” An exhale. “Don’t worry about it. It certainly wasn’t your advice that got me — ” She cut herself off. Shepard was attentive now, staring down the monitor with both ears trained on Ashley’s voice for a clue, but there was none coming. “I can’t go into it now. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“All right,” Shepard said, realizing she’d pushed too far. “Safe travels.”

“You too, Skipper.”

The line clicked, and Shepard closed her terminal. Scrubbed a hand over her face. She was suddenly desperate for a distraction; instead of settling her fears about Ashley, talking to her seemed to have only added new ones.

She didn’t enjoy questions about her health. She enjoyed hearing her acquaintances had been compromised — _failed_ — even less. Her overactive imagination seemed determined to pin this on herself: had she not recognized warning signs? Should she have recommended a different agent? She didn't like that this failure now sat on a friend’s record — the galaxy was shaky enough at the moment.

No. This was Ashley’s mission, hers to own.

Hard to let go, indeed.

Shepard looked up from her hand. She had been given a small, private cabin one level below the officers’ deck designed for use by visiting dignitaries or guests of importance. She’d once been insulted — _Put me in the crew quarters, I’m not a special case —_ but after seeing how turians slept in tight rows of triple, sometimes quadruple bunks in organized, identical rows, she’d understood. She slept poorly in her cabin, but she’d sleep even worse smashed together in a claustrophobic coffin between strangers. As such, her cabin was a luxury in and of itself, even though it didn’t offer much in the way of space. This suited her fine, as she had brought only her clothing, omnitool, and technician’s kit for her leg onboard; but she tried to avoid spending her free time here all the same. She spent so many hours staring up at this ceiling every night struggling for sleep, talking herself out of taking Garrus’s sofa again, that she avoided this cabin like the plague during the day cycle. With the lights on, this utilitarian turian architecture felt more like a human’s version of a walk-in closet. What was there to do?

All that was to say, it was cramped in here. She didn’t mind it normally: it was small and private and made for sleeping. Failing that, if she had to not sleep, might as well not-sleep together with someone else.

Now, though, she felt anxious. It would be a while till Garrus was done with his debrief; Elaria would follow with her report, and undoubtedly the officers would all have questions.

Only Garrus knew what to do with her when she got anxious; he’d take one look at her, tense and brimming with restlessness, and offer to relieve some stress. _Yes_ , she always said, because _yes_ was the only thing she felt like saying when she couldn’t think inside her own head and felt a sudden overwhelming, immense need to be touching someone she knew and trusted to make sure she was still herself.

There was probably something there in that. At present, she did not feel like unpacking it; now, or ever.

Now, she felt like working off some energy. It had been a long time since she’d visited the training room or combat sim during day hours, but maybe it’d be clear now.

She gathered her workout clothes and headed to the lift. The corridors were mercifully empty; the staff were in the canteen for supper. She had maybe an hour or two before people would trickle in for an after-dinner workout or sparring match.

Shit, maybe Garrus would come down. It’d been a long time since they sparred together; since before the Catalyst, actually. He’d always declined when she asked him now, citing some bull excuse, but she had a suspicion he was afraid of hurting her, setting back her progress. When she was dressed in her workout gear, the outline of her prosthetic was more noticeable. Sometimes she wore gym shorts and caught subtle glances at it. Easier to remember that she was one malfunction away from forced bed rest in the medbay, and then getting shoved back into a hospital bed at Huerta while doctors and technicians poked at her with more screws and needles.

He was really unbelievable sometimes. She wouldn’t treat him like glass if it’d happen to _him_.

Of course, he never seemed to have a problem when they were doing the horizontal hokey pokey, either. Though that one was really her fault. When they started up again, Garrus had been interested, but firmly reluctant to risk her health and stamina, so they’d waited until she could run laps around the hospital; that was the deal. Looking back, she wondered if she’d been overcompensating by asking him to keep up their… their whatever-this-was in the face of the crumbled ruins of civilization around them. At the time, she’d just wanted something to distract the two of them from the world outside. She’d wanted to feel normal.

So she used sex as a way to not talk about it. She used wanting sex to avoid thinking about it. Sometimes she wondered if Garrus was using it to avoid pitying her; or if it was his version _of_ pitying her. She couldn’t think of anything he had to gain from it anymore. The only benefits seemed to be hers. That felt — unfair, all of it done just to satisfy her.

Occasionally she still stumbled upon thoughts like this — wondering in a moment of weakness if this whole thing had stretched the boundaries of what she considered acceptable, deciding it had, and resolving to change her behavior, or even end the arrangement altogether. She never did; she pretended she hadn’t thought anything at all and continued on as she had.

She already knew they were well past professional. Oddly enough, their liason was slightly more passable on the SR-2, where he was only a temporary attaché, and they had belonged to different Navy commands and therefore different fraternization laws. Now, she wondered if the paradigm had changed in more ways than she’d noticed. Garrus was her protégé in only name; in all other ways he was now her equal.

Shepard tapped the panel for the cargo hold and drummed her fingers against the back wall as the lift descended. While she was reevaluating this, she should also revisit the moment she’d had this afternoon. That she should lose control of herself over his safety in the field, when he might have needed her the most, was unprofessional — more than that, it was unacceptable and offended every sense of discipline she’d drilled into herself back at ICT. Vakarian had been in dangerous conditions before. She had _put him_ in danger before. He had risked danger _for_ her _of his own will_ before. It was a mark of her own shortcomings that she wasn’t able to put her past aside when he needed her in return.

The elevator doors opened to an empty cargo hold. It was much smaller than the Normandy’s; no Hammerhead would fit inside here, though there was a long strip for UT-89 rover, affectionately nicknamed by the crew as _Milineux_ , apparently an inside joke from a popular turian program back on Palaven (Shepard roughly understood this to be the turian equivalent of christening a military vehicle _Dune Buggy_ ).

Only one person was in the cargo bay; their legs stuck out from the underbelly of the dune buggy. Probably the gunnery officer running a sweep through the systems after Garrus’s trip down to the surface. The vehicle was a unique model to the Hierarchy: light, fast, and undetectable by nearly all long-range scanners in the galaxy once the hex shields went up. Garrus had parked it a kilometer away from the transport depot, traveled the rest of his way on foot, and made the same trip back out, but checking for bugs or unfortunate pickups that had followed them home was never time poorly spent.

Gunnery Officer Stilx was a powerhouse of a woman who had enlisted back into the Hierarchy late in life. Garrus mentioned she had turned down several promotions by former officers on her own request. It was tedious work, but she said she enjoyed taking care of the firearms and vehicle maintenance, and was better at it too, faster than the rest of the crew combined. Nobody could argue with her; she was efficient, like all career military turians, and so Garrus never saw fit to reassign her.

“What can I do for ya, Spectre?” came Stilx’s muffled grunt from underneath the Milineux as Shepard stepped off the elevator.

“Well done,” Shepard said, slightly surprised. She thought she’d been quiet as she entered; Cortez used to listen to his music as he worked on the Kodiac, and occasionally missed her arrival to the cargo bay back on the SR-2 as he shouted across the bay to Vega. Stilx, with her turian hearing, probably spent so much time down here that she knew how to identify each visitor’s footsteps. Though to be fair, Shepard was one of only two humans onboard.

“Lucky guess,” Stilx replied. Shepard heard another grunt and Stilx’s long, spindly Amazonian legs shifted under the car. “Nguyen was just down here too, but I didn't think he’d be back so soon.”

“I’m just using a heavy bag,” Shepard said as Stilx rolled herself from underneath the vehicle. “Is the thirty kilo in there?”

Stilx snorted as though Shepard had made a joke, then she seemed to catch herself. “Sorry,” she said at Shepard’s look. “Turian definition of a heavy bag is a little different.”

“Yeah, you’re all better and stronger and faster than us, we get it,” Shepard laughed a little, surprising herself. It seemed somehow easier to pretend at normality with a stranger. Even joke, as though she didn’t feel hypersensitive, raw, frayed at the edges, as if someone pulling at the wrong thread might undo her entirely.

Stilx cleaned her hands and put her gloves back on. “Sorry to say most of the bags aren't in good shape. Those morons from engineering were down here last night drinking, spilled beer everywhere, soaked into the vinyl. They stink like a brothel in lower Zakera. The twenty’s fine, though.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey,” Stilx called out as Shepard passed by her to step into the training area. “You good?”

Shepard turned. “Yeah?”

Stilx was observing her. She was barefaced with pale gray plates and bright blue eyes; rare coloring, as Shepard understood it. She felt now a bit like a mouse being pinned under the gaze of a hawk. “Just,” Stilx started. She stopped and waved at her face; no, Shepard realized, she was gesturing to the side of her mandible with the back of her hand. “Nothing. Be seeing you.”

Shepard headed into the small training room at the back of the cargo bay and left the door open; better to see anyone who might exit the elevator and judge when she should leave. She punched in her preferences into the keypad, and the twenty kilo appeared from behind a rotating wall. It did smell vaguely of stale beer, though gratefully she saw no stains.

She began with some familiar repeat combo drills, trying to rebuild her muscle memory. Shepard was still not where she had been pre-Crucible, but she had three out of five Citadel surgeons saying that beginning with her old power drills was fine so long as she paced herself, which was good enough for her.

What she really wanted to work on was footwork; she still felt anxious, jittery. But turians didn’t design their bags to swing: they were used for quick warm-ups, with real practice taking place in the ring. So maybe what she really wanted was a sparring partner: someone to fight against in complete and utter silence. No, that wasn’t right — she wanted to beat someone up. Some _thing_ up. Wanted to put everything she was feeling, every thought rattling around in her head, into her fists and feel them release as she threw her punches, wanted to be with someone who would understand her urges without having to hear them explained.

Yet she also craved solitariness. She didn’t want to talk or think or deal with other people. Other people were horseshit. Modern society was garbage. How many years since the Eden Prime War, since the Collectors, since the invasion? She wasn’t counting anymore. Time had never felt the same since waking up in the hospital; weeks felt like months and sometimes months felt like days. The galaxy reverted back to its status quo: drug wars bleeding out from Omega, pirate raids in the Terminus, corruption on the Citadel, GMOs gone rogue, more and more frequent coups back on Earth. Nothing had changed; she expected nothing to change, and was still disappointed. It was all bullshit and organic life was doomed to destroy itself eventually.

She saved galactic civilization, so she had a right to feel that way. Any time other people — reporters to diplomats to the anonymous netizens venting their worries online — mentioned similar predictions about their impending post-Reaper democratic collapse, even facetiously, Shepard felt haughty and entitled. _I sacrificed too much for you to say that, asshole. You’d better make the most of it._ Or maybe, _Only I get to think those things._

This was why she’d felt it only right to sequester herself away from the public eye after the war. She’d tried giving it all another chance after waking up in London, mostly because she really had no other option. But struggling to accept Anderson’s death, watching Hackett disappear into rebuilding the Alliance Parliament, seeing the Normandy crew — Ash and Vega and Traynor and Cortez reassigned to help tame the anarchy that had arisen, the rest of her team now scattered to the galaxy — all go their separate ways, the easiest option felt now to say to hell with all of it. If she was going to be left behind, she should do some leaving of her own. So she argued her way into a decommission and limped onto the Citadel, where she bullied her way back into Spectrehood. Or an attempt at it; she had this assignment to check off her list first, this one to determine if she was sound of mind before the Council decided if she was ready for real combat again.

Not that she was unhappy to be here. Garrus was the only link she could hold onto on this side of the war. Being put on desk duty was her greatest fear; agreeing to mentor him had come as a relief.

Her knuckles were starting to feel numb from the hits. Good.

Only Garrus had stayed, back in London. Out of loyalty or guilt, she still wasn’t sure. 

Shepard lost herself in the rhythm of her drills. It was monotonous and quickly grew tiring, yet somehow just what she needed: mindless action, energy expelled that hurt nobody and nothing except a poor sack of stuffed vinyl. The scene from earlier was behind her: Garrus was a fully capable agent in his own right. He was nearly a Spectre himself, and she would no longer waste time worrying about him.

And she was clearly letting their history affect her perception of him and their relationship. That had to change.

Shepard had never been good at figuring out what she wanted, but she had a sharp eye for objective judgment when it came to personnel issues. If it had been anyone else, she would’ve advised them to leave years ago: not for their own benefit, but for the betterment of the junior officer. 

Unbidden, words from the profile that the old Shadow Broker had collected drifted back to the center of her thoughts: _Unlikely to develop under Shepard’s leadership._ Great — she hadn’t felt guilty about that one in a while.

She’d thought she’d been supporting Garrus, agreeing to this position. He hadn’t objected; hell, he’d been glad to have her around, or so she thought. Was it just pity? What else do you do with a commanding officer following you around after the war was over? Was he too shy to break it off professionally after they kept sleeping together? What did the rest of the crew think of keeping a washed-up soldier around, anyway? 

Shepard slammed her first into the bag and leaned her forehead against it, panting. She’d lost count of her drill. The sweat on her forehead stuck to the bag, and Jesus, it really did smell like bad beer, but the vinyl was cool against her skin. She closed her eyes.

She was a mess. She was a mess and she needed help, or a ten-year nap, or at the very least a damn strong painkiller to deal with her raging headache.

Behind the membrane of her eyelids, she saw the room grow dark, and then light again. She frowned. Squinted her eyes tightly shut, then blinked them open.

Garrus was standing in the doorway, drawing his finger up and down the panel to control the lightswitch. When he saw her looking, he smiled.

“Hey,” he said from the entrance.

“…Hi,” she said back roughly. Her heart was still pounding, breath heaving quietly.

“You need a partner?”

“…No,” she said, and peeled her sticky face from the bag. The thought of fighting Garrus might have once excited her, but now it just exhausted her. She had no more energy for fighting. “I’m done for today.”

He nodded. “You weren’t at the briefing. Everything all right?”

She unwrapped her hands slowly. Garrus watched her tired fingers work. “Got a message from Ash,” she said. There didn’t seem to be a point in keeping it from him — besides which, it was a more acceptable alibi than _I thought about Torfan for more than a passing second again_.

Also: it was the truth. Garrus could smell a lie like a bloodhound. “She’s asking to meet up at the New Citadel. If you’re all set with Ubetzia, I might ask we restock back there as soon as we can.”

Garrus sighed, and Shepard prepared herself. That didn’t usually indicate good news.

“Want to come up?” he asked. “If I’m gonna tell the whole thing over again, might as well be on that nice leather couch the Hierarchy got for me.” He looked around and sniffed. “Also it smells like the boys were having a bender down here. Unless you’ve been coming down here to drink without me.”

“Every day at five.”

Garrus leveled her a look that told her that if turians were capable of rolling their eyes, his would have already hit the back of his head. “You coming up, or am I writing my report alone?”

“I’m coming.” Shepard pressed the panel to retract the twenty-kilo and gathered her bag.

“Oh,” Garrus said suddenly as he followed her out the doorway and turned off the lights, “and happy birthday.”

* * *

She settled herself onto the leather couch of his cabin as Garrus got a few things downloaded from his terminal to bring over to her. This couch was designed for the turian spine and was therefore massive: it was rigid in the wrong places and curved at the top to accommodate for fringe, but Shepard dragged a pillow over from the bed and settled herself against an armrest.

Garrus moved over to her hesitantly with his datapad. He looked like he wanted to say something. “You sure you’re all right?” he finally asked. His tone was odd.

Shepard squinted a little in confusion.

He made a gesture to the edge of his mandible that felt familiar, and then she remembered: it was the same gesture that Stilx had hours earlier. She realized now that he was gesturing to his equivalent of her cheek.

Shepard’s hand flew to her face on instinct, then hovered there, like she was a uncertain what she’d find if she looked. “That bad, huh?” she muttered.

“There’s some gauze in the restroom,” Garrus said kindly, because he was too polite to say _your face looks like you were sewn back to life by Edward Scissorhands_.

In the bathroom, Shepard swatted at her cheek with some paper towels. Spots of blood appeared, though fortunately not many. She winced as she tilted her neck, observing the scars in the mirror. At some point during her workout she’d probably reopened them. Fortunately the ruptures between this damn skin weave were shallow so the bleeding never lasted long; unfortunately, they never seemed to heal for good. Shepard had put it on her mental to-do list to get in contact with Miranda about a possible solution, if the galaxy ever stopped setting itself on fire long enough for her to make time for personal matters.

But then Miranda had never come back from London, and after that, the only personal matter Shepard ever had the energy to tend to was telling herself she didn’t need to self-flagellate over yet another person she might have failed.

She splashed her face with water too, for the hell of it. Her knuckles still burned faintly from the workout, but in a good way. She never minded a little pain. She just liked it on her own terms.

Maybe there was something in there. She’d done more than enough navel-gazing to last a year, but it felt good to come to a realization that answered a question. Maybe that was just who she was, and she had to accept it: she was malcontent because she’d gotten complacent as a soldier. She was used to calling the shots on her missions, and if she got hit, she knew exactly where it was coming from and why. She knew exactly how to retaliate for maximum effect and impact.

This was just her first time experiencing collateral damage. This was just her seeing what happened in the aftermath of someone like her calling the shots unchecked for years.

But Shepard knew what she was good at, too. She was good at solving problems. She was good at being underestimated and coming back to prove everyone wrong.

She was good to her crew.

She had a debt to repay Garrus. And while she was in here stewing over her own failures, he was out there waiting for her. She hadn’t been there for him in the field this morning, but she could make up for that now.

“So,” she said when she exited the washroom, “tell me everything, including what you didn’t say in the debrief.”

From the couch, his mandibles quivered in a funny little expression she liked to call _catching him in a secret_. 

“First things first,” he said, and tossed a datapad at her. She caught it one-handed as she seated herself a few cushions over against her pillow. “It’s not slave labor down there. It’s worse.”

She glanced up at him.

“It’s ‘voluntary’ indentured servitude. Which means we can’t do anything about it. My money’s on some nondescript office working out of a place like the Nos Astra and offering refugees or people fleeing domestic violence a deal they can’t refuse. And they sign on because they’re desperate, or they need to hide, and either don’t read the fine print or can’t afford not to.”

Shepard read the datapad. It looked to be a daily worker roster Garrus had downloaded from a terminal; most people listed had no surnames, no ages, no other identification other than a number and bunker assignment.

“Shit,” she muttered as the noticed the miniscule size of the scrollbar. “This is just one level?”

“The largest level, yeah. But there are five in total, so it should give you a sense of the operation they’re working with.”

“I’m assuming they don’t keep their records lying around on terminals. How d’you figure it’s an agreement?”

“Hacked a comm line while I was down there. I overheard a foreman mentioning the time he had left — seven years. Could be a prison, I s’pose.” Garrus scratched his neck distractedly. “That’s where my mind went first. But it didn’t seem right. Why no prison break, no sign of resistance? Then his buddy on the other line mentioned his ‘deal with the contractor,’ and it clicked.”

Shepard flicked through the digital pages. All of it looked to be information on the personnel and staff; nothing on the illicit drug trade. “The black mercury,” she said slowly. “Any leads?”

“Far as I can tell, the labs are on the deepest level. I found air shafts to air out the fumes, but no elevators down. The lab is still running an analysis on the air quality specs I sent up. There were definitely some gases down there even my tool couldn’t pick up on. It’s their entire trade, so I imagine they keep the entrances well hidden.”

“Could you tell how far deep the shafts go?”

“Short of dropping a rock down there, no. It would’ve alerted anyone below.”

“You’re sure they’re labs down there?”

Garrus looked at her curiously. “My tool picked up methane and hydrogen sulfide coming up from that shaft. None of that’s necessary for patholium mining — they wouldn’t be processing the ore that far down, anyway. They’d bring it up to the plant.”

“But no samples? Any evidence?”

“It’s a well-organized maze of hidden entrances and paranoid cooks down there. I didn’t expect to find a batch of the stuff lying around. Flip a few tabs over,” he said, gesturing to her datapad. “The first one is a map for the public. The second is the layout I stole from the foreman.”

Shepard observed the latter for several seconds, and then looked up at him. “This contact on Omega,” she said. “The one who gave you this lead — ”

“I trust him,” Garrus said. “As much as you can trust anyone on Omega. I know what you’re thinking. But it’s best — only — lead I’ve got. They’ve certainly got the means to mix up some nasty surprises down there, and the space to hide it.”

She went back to the datapad. She scrolled down through the different levels. These were flat images, but with these dimensions and Garrus’s notes, one of the tactics officers could probably have a 3D layout drawn up within a day. “These large halls at the base of the mountain…”

“I’m guessing they’re the lab facilities where they cook the product. See the corridors there, smaller rooms attached? Probably living areas. Small canteen with food brought down on shielded and scanned dumbwaiters, so nobody sneaks product in or out. I doubt most of those workers see sunlight more than once a decade.”

Shepard scrubbed her forehead in thought. This was the Terminus; Citadel authority was as useful here as a ball of rubber bands. “We can’t nab anyone for illicit substances; we knew that going in. And if they’re all contracted out of Illium — ”

“I don’t see anyone volunteering to dedicate their next five years to navigating mountains of legalese to free the workers,” Garrus finished. “I think it’s easiest to go after the drugs. Expose and dismantle the real product, that eliminates most of the complicit administration. We can’t get anyone for creating product out here, but we can absolutely find a lawsuit in selling unapproved product made in these conditions within Citadel space.”

“So long as it’s coming out of here,” Shepard reminded him. “There’s still no hard evidence _this_ lab is the source of the black mercury.”

“Yeah.” Garrus breathed out through his nose. “I don’t see anyone getting any without finding their way down to the labs themselves. Another infiltration? Or an undercover operation, you think?”

“It’s your mission,” she said easily.

He gave her a weird look. “Aren’t you here to advise me or something?”

“I can tell you how _I’d_ do it. I’d buff my cloak and jump down there myself and wouldn’t come back up until I had hard evidence.” She paused. “Though that comes with its own risks,” she added, unwittingly reminded of Aratoht.

Garrus watched her for a moment longer, then nodded. “I’m gonna have a think about this. Elaria said she got yanked around a lot by the staff, but she noticed all the security cams were facing inward — toward the entrances. That’s weird, right?”

“Suspicious, at the very least.” Shepard was caught off guard by a yawn. She looked at the time in the corner of the datapad; it was almost midnight. Today felt like it’d lasted a month.

“You want something to drink?” Garrus asked her. “You look like you could use it.”

“No,” she snorted. “Thanks.” Alcohol used to be a mild comfort; now it only made her dreams worse.

“Half an hour left in your birthday,” Garrus said. His voice was pointed, like he was searching for her reaction to something. She looked up at him. “You sure you’re good, Shepard?”

She didn’t want to lie to him, but she didn’t want to tell him the truth. It seemed easiest to find a happy medium: give up one truth to distract and disguise harder truths.

“I don’t know how old I am,” she said honestly.

He blinked slowly. “Well — er. You were born in…”

“‘54,” she said quietly. “But that’s not what I meant.”

She saw the moment it clicked for him. Garrus nodded slowly. “Well,” he started, then stopped.

She had stopped celebrating her birthday after Mindoir; she had stopped keeping count of her years after Cerberus. How do you age a dead woman brought back to life?

“Thirty-something?” he offered. “And then eventually you’ll be forty-something, and fifty-something.”

“Easy to remember,” she acknowledged, though in the privacy of her mind she couldn’t imagine herself being forty- or fifty- anything. The last years of her mid-thirties still felt unreal.

“Hey, you can always copy my birthday. Everyone’s lying about their age now, even the asari. No one’ll notice.”

She quirked the corner of her lip without looking at him, but it was half-hearted.

“…Shepard,” Garrus said quietly. She looked up; his blue eyes were drilled onto hers. “Please stay tonight. We don’t have to do anything. I’m just.” He stopped.

She waited.

“I worry about you,” he said. Garrus always talked about his feelings like he was confessing something. Maybe he was.

Shepard didn’t know how to respond. It seemed right to reassure him, somehow, but she wasn’t made for that. She didn’t have the first idea what to do.

She raised her right hand and lifted it to his cheek. She meant it as an acknowledgment — of his feelings, of everything they’d been through together — but maybe she also meant it as an apology, or a thank you. She wasn’t really sure. She felt many impossible things when she talked to Garrus it felt impossible to separate any of them without tugging apart the others.

What happened next felt inevitable. His hand was on her cheek, he was observing her scars, and then her hand dropped to his waist. Then they were on the same cushion together, and then she was horizontal on the bed.

Maybe the crux of it was that she was never going to change, and any epiphanies she had in her private time would never amount to worthwhile progress because she would forever be weak to the simplest looks. Maybe she had doomed herself to this course long ago by propositioning him that day in the battery and unconsciously accepting whatever risks to her career that followed. Maybe Garrus didn’t overthink this as much as she did and all this was to him was a good lay. She didn’t want to think so. But maybe.

“This morning,” she said lowly. He was over her and her head was foggy; part of her was watching herself talk, didn’t know what she was saying. “When I mentioned sharing you with the Citadel.”

Garrus made a low noise, nearly a grunt, to indicate he’d heard her. His mouth was preoccupied, his tongue making delightful patterns on her breast.

“Did you like that?” she asked. It was nearly a whisper.

He didn’t reply. His mouth nipped the peak of her breast; Shepard shuddered every time, from her head to the base of her spine.

“Of being with someone else?” she continued, urgent now, feeling relentless. “Or of someone seeing us?”

“Shepard,” Garrus groaned. He was back up at her neck again. His voice was strained, like he was holding in some great emotion — or perhaps holding back his finish, always so desperate to last as long as he can, as though it were a competition, as though not to disappoint. “Why are you asking?”

“Because,” she panted, “I think I left the door unlocked.”

He became rock hard within her. His sharp fingers grasped either side of her hips, nails digging in. Shepard let him have her, hooked her legs tight around his waist.

When it was over, there was a lazy five seconds of blissful exhaustion before Garrus pulled back, looking at her from an arm’s length. That in itself would be unusual, even more so by the look he gave her. Brows furrowed, mandibles clamped tight to his face, tension in his shoulders around his carapace.

The fog was starting to clear. “Did I overstep?” she asked.

It felt like an eternity before he shook his head. Didn’t look at her. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “I’m — ah.”

He removed himself from her, pulled the covers to her waist — an old turian bedsharing courtesy, as she understood it — and headed to the door of his cabin. Set the locks in silence. And then he dipped into the bathroom without a word.

Alone in the bed, Shepard felt stunned, as though caught in the whiplash from a car accident. She had enough mental functioning to just dimly wonder where she’d gone wrong.

Voyeurism was hardly the strangest interest. Perhaps he simply found the… interspecies aspect arousing in itself. God, wasn’t that a fun way to think about it… Fornax had multiple magazine lines dedicated entirely to interracial porn, though she’d never really thought Garrus the type. Was he sensitive about that kind of topic? It didn’t seem like him, but she’d never brought it up before, and he could be charmingly obtuse about the strangest things…

Maybe it was just addressing it aloud that had embarrassed him. Or the thought of acting on it.

Or the thought of someone else knowing.

The entire galaxy seems to still for a moment as Shepard paused, chewed that over.

The thought of _letting_ someone else know, maybe.

God, but Shepard’s wondered the same thing. She had her reasons — and they were non-negotiables _for_ a reason. Sleeping with her subordinate — now her mentee — violated so many rules on a political and personal level and yet, wouldn’t it all be so much easier? If she could step out and say, _yes, this is how it is now_?

But to do so involved a degree of ownership that Shepard wasn’t sure how or even if to engage with. She’d always seen their arrangement as temporary fix, an itch to scratch, or good old fashioned xenophilic curiosity, until Garrus screwed his head on straight and got his life together enough to find someone back on Palaven to settle down with. Or until she finally got sick of the whole rotten thing of it and bought that cruiser and flew off into the stars without a warning to anyone left behind. Whichever happened first.

It’d ruin his career, if this got out. It might even ruin her future prospects too, though she found that she didn’t give a varren’s ass about that side of things these days.

Say he succeeded. Say he did get appointed to Special Tactics. She would have nothing over him; they’d be equals. What would happen then?

What did he _want_ from her?

When Garrus came out of the bathroom, he was freshly showered and water dripped from the end of his fringe. He was wearing loose civvies, but his shoulders were tense, as though he were heading into a battlefield. Shepard was dressed in her pants and undershirt, sitting cross-legged on the bed.

“Why’d you agree to Spectre candidacy?” she asked him point-blank, and Garrus stilled. She had excelled in reading and resolving interpersonal disputes back in OTS. She knew her crew. She knew Garrus. “Give it to me honest. I know you want to make a difference. You always do. But this time there was something different. Wasn’t there?”

He was staring at her. He looked like he wanted to say something, yet he made no move to answer. His eyes were so blue, so blue and bright, and Jesus, she knew the answer anyway, didn’t she? Why torture him to make him say it aloud?

Garrus crossed the cabin, finally, and settled on the edge right in front of her. She had the impression that he was thinking very seriously about whatever something he was going to say before he said it.

And then he looked up at her, leaned in, and pressed his forehead to hers.

It clicked.

“Oh my God,” she said quietly. She closed her eyes as he pulled back. “You love me.”

Garrus swallowed and moved back. He seemed to have come to a decision without her: he began picking up what remained of her clothes and his from the floor, and didn’t look at her again. They were not the movements of a man looking to avoid eye contact or communication; they were precise, the movements of someone who had made up his mind.

“Garrus,” Shepard said, starting to feel a bit ignored. Which was ridiculous, after what she’d just said, wasn’t it? Or had she imagined the whole thing in an unsuspecting fugue state? Had she just had a very bizarre, abstract daydream? Could she just pretend nothing had happened?

He sighed. He still wasn’t looking at her. “Yeah, Shepard?”

Here, she faltered. _I want to know if I’m right. I want to know why I’m here. I want to know how long you thought you could keep it hidden._

“This whole time,” she starts instead — but before she could go anywhere with it, he shook his head.

“Nah,” Garrus said heavily. He was putting his things away, but he returned to deposit her uniform next to her on the bed, now folded. “No,” he said more clearly, formally, like he wanted to do this over. “I don’t know when. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Shepard said, “I mean, this whole time, that’s what this has been?”

Garrus looked at her now. His face was unreadable, mandibles completely still, betraying nothing. “No, Shepard,” he said oddly, “I know a lost cause when I see one.”

Whatever that meant. Shepard rose to her feet. She found that — strangely — she was not relieved or happy about anything that was happening in this conversation. She felt — angry.

“You said you worried about me,” she began, because it was an irrefutable fact. “You — has this been what this is? You only agreed to this because — what is this? Pity?”

Garrus’s rigid face went through a series of tells in a very short time. He first looked alarmed; then his eyes narrowed, and then his mandibles slackened. She couldn’t figure out what any of it meant, but then, she was finding it hard to think over the pounding of her heart, the rush of blood in her head.

“I thought you were here because you wanted to be,” he said slowly, like he was testing the waters.

“Don’t handle me, Garrus.”

“I’m not handling you, Shepard,” he snapped, and there, finally, she got some real emotion. Exasperation. He rose. “I thought — I guess I hoped this would be something you were… interested in.”

Shepard laughed on reflex. “What — hunting down backwater chemists in the Terminus boonies?” She immediately regretted it.

Garrus shook his head. “My recommendation to Special Tactics. I’ve never — I’ve always valued your advice. And your company. Professional, or… personal.”

“Stop,” she said, because it felt strangely like he’d crossed a line, by saying something like that aloud. “That’s not — I mean.” She was an inarticulate mess. She took a deep breath, tried again. “You don’t have to say… any of this. I appreciate your intention to include me in your nomination. But if it’s all the same to you — ”

“I didn’t agree to this arrangement because you are who you are to me,” Garrus said stiffly. Coldly. “I wouldn’t do either of us that dishonor. I did it because you’re the strongest agent in the business… and my best friend. Sorry if that makes you uncomfortable.”

Shepard felt like a heel. The reality of it all was beginning to sink in: Garrus loved her. She still couldn’t really process it — but it was a mistake to treat this flippantly. Even if she had no idea what to make of her own thoughts of him, he deserved better.

“I’m — I don’t mean to be callous,” she said slowly. “I… you’re mine, too.” _Best friend_ , she meant. But Shepard didn’t say those kinds of words aloud: she could take a bullet for her crew, break her back for them, die for them, but she could not tell them she loved them.

( _Did she?_

Yes. She did. Another fault of hers, clearly, that she never properly expressed it in time to matter.)

“And you’ve — done so much for me,” she stumbled.

“Spare me the cliches, Shepard,” Garrus said irritably. “I’m a big guy. You’re not going to hurt my feelings.”

“I don’t know what to say, Garrus,” she told him. “I’ve never done this before.”

“What is ‘ _this_ ,’ then, that you’re doing?” he asked stiffly, but she ploughed on.

“And I’ve been — I don’t regret coming here,” she said, which was true enough. “I accepted because…”

He waited.

Shepard admitted defeat. “You’re entitled to your reasons. I… might just not know what mine are.”

“You don’t know why you agreed to mentor me?”

“You were the only one that stayed after London, Garrus,” she said desperately. She couldn’t look at him; she paced the room. “You’ve — done things for me that I didn’t ask for. But I am — I’ll always be… grateful. I don’t know how to express that.”

He was motionless, staring at her. “You mean that time in the hospital,” he said flatly.

She swallowed. Her feet stopped. She resisted the urge to glance to his bare arm, the long jagged scar there, because to do so would be to remember how he gained it. “I didn’t say that.”

“You meant it.”

She didn’t feel like thinking about herself in the hospital again. She didn’t feel like fighting his memories of the event. She didn’t feel like fighting anything anymore.

_Garrus loves me._

So he did. Tired or weak or bone-weary or cowardly as she was, he loved her. It seemed nonsensical, but then, Shepard admittedly knew very little about things like love.

“Either way,” she said, “I can’t — continue like this.”

Garrus didn’t react outwardly; she had a faint suspicion that he was not surprised at all. She wondered now if this is what he had been preparing himself for earlier.

“I’ve been thinking about reassignments,” she said, which she hadn’t, but it was effectively true, because she was thinking about them now.

“Have you,” he said quietly.

“Before today,” she said, but it didn’t matter if he believed her; the damage was done. “Ash — her call. She needs me.”

Silence settled in the cabin like a heavy fog. Shepard registered vaguely that she was cold, and then that she was still only half-dressed. She longed to wrap herself up in her uniform again, use it as a shield between her and the rest of the world — to keep something out or in, she couldn’t say. But to move would break the tension in the room; Garrus deserved the chance to respond first.

“Okay,” he said eventually. He rose. “Okay.”

He went to the door. He was still only dressed in his civvies. 

“I’ll set a course for the New Citadel,” he said before he exited. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. “Top priority. Get some sleep — we’ll be there before you wake.”

The door swished behind him and the latch clicked. Shepard was left alone with herself and her mess of emotions, and asked herself this was what she had wanted.

Something shifted in the edge of her vision; she looked. The digital clock on the nightstand had just changed. It was 00:09 AM.

It was no longer her birthday. Somehow that felt relieving, and yet in another way, it didn’t mean anything to her at all.

* * *

Shepard packed alone in her cabin.

While Garrus was on the bridge directing the pilot of their new course, she was slowly folding her one pair of civvies. She imagined him downstairs in the sparring room, as she was making the room spotless, as though she’d never set foot inside. While she imagined him back upstairs in his cabin, Shepard was staring at the ceiling above her own bed, and thinking about nothing, because sleeping invited dreams.

She didn’t think about the crew or the mission. Garrus would do fine on his own. He had proved that yesterday. He didn’t need her. And about the rest of it…

He was mistaken. Clearly. Had to be. And she had become dependent. It was for the best.

The truth of it was that Garrus needed her far less than she needed him. Back on the SR-1, Joker had once made a tactless wisecrack by relating Garrus to an eager-to-please mutt, trotting along at the captain’s side looking for approval — Shepard had rebuffed him then, but she realized now he’d had it the other way around. In times of uncertainty, it was Shepard who now followed along like a stray at his heels, desperate for attention, for approval, for companionship. It was Shepard who was out of place in peacetime, the square peg, the black sheep, and that would not change with a few kind words.

Shepard was starting to accept that she would never change. She would run in the same circles of combat and exhaustion and stress until she eventually collapsed from the whole weight of it. Maybe she’d be found dead somewhere after a mission gone wrong; maybe she wouldn’t be found at all. She was not in the mood or mindset to seek death, but she accepted that in the life she led, death may catch her first. To think herself an exception was a mistake: it had already found her once.

This realization didn’t terrify or deter her, though she realized vaguely it should have: these were not the thoughts of a normal person. But Shepard accepted that she was not normal — she couldn’t be, to live the life she did. She lived in extremities and excelled there, found her worth there. There was very little room for intimacy in this kind of life; she now knew why.

In the privacy of her own mind, she’d once likened Garrus to her lifeline. Going on without his large, steady presence by her side was unthinkable. Now she couldn’t think about looking him in the eye anymore, too afraid of what she’d see there.

Shepard lay in bed as the Parentia hummed quietly back toward Council space, back toward the remains of Earth and Palaven and Sur’Kesh, back toward the New Citadel and her old life. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she knew what she was leaving. That had to be enough.

With the time left to her, she thought of all the unexplored space that connected the stars. The unexplored planets that once held life, that species to come might one day replace galactic civilization. She thought of all the Mindoirs, the Horizons and Eden Primes. She wondered how many iterations of Torfan had occurred throughout history. That was the problem with organic life: it was always so much easier to remember the bad stuff than the good.

 

 

 

V.

The Wedjet ward of the New Citadel had half the size of the three other wings and double the grandeur. Some argument had been raised about replicating the Presidium: with the old model of bureaucratic hierarchy and exclusivity came the old status quo, the old social restrictions. To counter, the new Council made an offer: as a token of good faith and an acknowledgment of their sacrifice, the Humans System Alliance had been given the rights to name and design the ward. The human nostalgia for classic egyptology won out, because when the human ambassador put the name to popular vote, Wedjet easily dominated the other suggestions offered on the public polling terminals.

Wedjet: protection, good health, and royal power.

_Strike the last one,_ Shepard thought now as the elevator opened up and she stepped onto the newly christened Citadel Plaza. _The rest will have to do._

Of the original five wards, Tayseri and Shalta had been utterly demolished between the double-whammy geth and Reaper attacks of ‘83 and ‘85. Only Tayseri had been salvageable: the deciding factor in the decision against recycling the entire ward for parts had been its surviving grav and oxygen tanks. Shalta had been quickly loosened from the docks and then picked apart by engineers and architects for construction efforts on Wadjet. Meanwhile, the future of Tayseri was still lost in administrative limbo: the keepers had cleared out the bodies, but nobody wanted to resettle. Rent was apparently rock-bottom, but something about the ward’s tendency to be hit first in a crisis inspired public superstition. It would be hard to shake; organic emotions could be hard to sway once they’d had a chance to settle, to fester. Shepard knew all too well.

Walking through the plaza now, you would have never guessed a war had been responsible for the remodeling. Civilians milled about between the fountain and shops lining the other side of the boulevard. It looked like business as normal, at least for some of the luckier citizens who had managed to survive the hijacking of the station and subsequent explosions at the end of the war. That was human — or organic — nature, she supposed, the return to normality; forcibly, if necessary. Eventually, if you pretended things were fine, then they would be fine. Or so it should go.

Spectre Ashley Williams was waiting for her at a coffee shop across the plaza. They had decided on somewhere innocently public; there were always prying ears at bars these days, but local cafes were only filled with young people on their tools and businesspeople wrapped up in their own conversations on their way out the door. Nobody cared who was sitting next to them; they only cared about not being bothered.

Shepard spotted Ashley immediately when she walked in: she was sitting next to the window, her dark hair draped over her shoulders, a rare sight, and she was sporting a black eye and a large bruise on her forehead. She was taking a long swig from her mug when Shepard sat down across from her.

“What happened,” Shepard said flatly, and Ashley choked.

“ _What happened_ ,” she repeated incredulously. Her voice sounded hoarse. “I could ask you the same thing.”

Shepard blinked and stared at her. Then on her right, she caught her reflection in the window: the scars on her cheek were illuminated like dull red powerlines.

Shepard scrubbed at them distractedly. That just made it worse. “Old wound reopened,” she said. “Yours looks recent.”

Ashley sighed. “I got pulled,” she said to her mug. Shepard noticed she was taking it black — she never did that, not unless she was in a dark mood. “Just as well, really. If I’d been any later, I’d’ve botched it. Intel was wrong, Bau’s assumptions were wrong, I could’ve been caught. But they reached me just in time. So I’m here.”

Shepard was starting to wonder if the cafe served alcohol. She thought the both of them might need it. “You didn’t fail, Williams,” she told her, because she knew where her former lieutenant’s thoughts were headed.

“Shepard, don’t give me that. I might as well have. It doesn't matter anymore — I’m off. But it’s for the best. I’m not made for sneaking around.” Ashley’s hands fidgeted between themselves; knuckles cracked, fingers wove in and wove out. Nerves. “Give me a gun and a target, I can do whatever you ask. I know my strengths. But I can’t — pretend to be good at what I’m not, pretend to be someone else for a mission. It nearly got me killed. And now that Bau knows — well, if that makes me bad Spectre material, then so be it.” She finished by dumping the remains of her coffee down her throat.

Shepard watched her collect herself for a moment. Ashley Williams was caught in the familiar web of self-criticism and doubt that followed a botched mission. It was easy to forget how younger she was than Shepard; times like this she was uncomfortably reminded again.

“You’re not a bad agent, Ash,” Shepard told her. When Ashley leveled her a flat look — a _don’t handle me_ look, she continued, “No, don’t give me that. Just because you didn’t get results on a first go. You were there at Thessia. Jondum Bau has been antsy to prove himself useful designating agents to missions since he’s been locked in the hospital — he made a bad call in putting you on something not suited to your strengths. You did the best you could. You’ll have other successes. You know that, too. But I’ll say it as many times as you need me to.”

“I didn’t call you here for a pep talk, Skipper,” Ashley said, but she was smiling wryly behind her mug. Her dark eyes were kind, underneath the black eye. “But thanks.”

“Well.” Shepard had the distinct feeling feeling she’d overstepped, and now felt uncomfortable. “Old habits, Lorikeet.”

“God.” Ash choked a bit on her coffee. “I’d forgotten how much I hate that codename. Can I change it?”

“Sure,” Shepard said distractedly, watching pedestrians outside the window. “Vakarian figured his out already anyway.” Talking about Garrus was strange; even saying his name sat heavily on her tongue. Shepard wondered if her voice sounded normal; if she was giving anything away at all.

“Speaking of — how’s Garrus?”

“Fine,” Shepard said.

Ashley blinked. “Just fine?”

“Last I checked. I recused myself as his mentor this morning.”

Ashley was shocked, but she hid it well; Shepard could only tell from the briefest pause before she replied. “Nepotism?” she asked. “I… guessed that would’ve come up sooner, if I’m honest.”

“Nah. Well — yes,” Shepard said, indecisive about what her story should be. She should’ve thought of something sooner. Shit. “There were… questions from the Council about it in the beginning. Now that he’s making progress… well the Council already knows my opinion on him. That kind of defeats the point. I think he should have someone that can judge him as… not a former boss.” She cleared her throat. “More an equal.”

“Hell, if that’s all it takes, I’ll do it,” Ashley smirked.

Shepard hesitated. “You would?”

“I mean — I was half joking,” Ashley said. “But if it’s a spot that needs filling… I won’t be cleared for active duty for a while longer anyway. He didn’t need you to go out in the field, did he?”

“No,” Shepard said. “You’re just on the comm and send weekly reports to Irissa. Be there for debriefings and talk strategy when he needs. But you know him — he’s self-sufficient.”

Ash nodded slowly, then held up her hands. “Huh. Am I actually considering this? I’ve never been someone’s mentor or teacher.”

“You don’t have to be. Isn’t that what you were just saying?” Shepard suddenly saw the situation with clear eyes: Ashley would be ideal. She, too, was looking for the right assignment for her after recovery; she knew Garrus; she was firm and affable and had a moral will of steel: she spoke from her heart but judged from her head; she was completely objective. She had experience from an arm’s length list of successful missions as a Spectre after the war. Garrus and Ashley liked each other well enough; more than that, though, she knew they respected each other above their personal feelings.

This would work. The coil of guilt that had settled in her stomach since the night previous loosened somewhat. Shepard would at least not be leaving Garrus alone.

_Stop worrying about him._

“I’ll think about it,” Ashley said wryly. She snorted. “Jeez. He’s captaining the new Hierarchy model, right? The Parentia? My grandfather would collapse dead at the thought of his granddaughter taking a position on a turian ship.”

“Your grandfather was a good man,” Shepard said truthfully, “but he hadn’t done half the things you’ve done. If you want the role, go for it.” And then she struck by an idea: an awful but brilliant idea. “And your mission — called off? Or reassigned?”

Ashley eyed her. “Tabled, for now,” she said. “Javan went to ground. That’s where intel failed us — he trapped me in the warehouse he’d led me to believe he was keeping the rest of his captives, saw right through all my fakes. Could be years before they find him again. By then the kids may be long gone.”

A part of Shepard sobered at the reminder of what Ashley had been doing, while she had been busy feeling sorry for herself these past few days: chasing a slaver, tracking down a criminal as revolting as he was cruel — trying to protect innocent lives.

God. That’s what she should be out there doing. She was so ready. Give her a gun and a cloak and a target — she’d do it. It’s what she was made for. Let her be her own woman. Let her chase something. Let her put a bullet in something. Someone who deserved it.

“Why do you ask?” Ashey’s voice brought her back to reality.

“Because,” Shepard said, “with your permission, I’d like to take it over.”

_Javan —_ Javan the batarian slaver. Real name unknown. 

Yes. Yes, this would do perfectly.

“Shepard,” Ashley said.

“Yeah?”

Ashley watched her, brow furrowed for a moment, and then sighed. Shepard had the impression she had just talked herself out of whatever it was she was going to say. “Whatever you’re going to do,” she said, “is it worth telling you to be careful?”

Shepard didn’t answer. She didn’t think Ash needed her to.

* * *

“Shepard.” Councilor Irissa spoke without raising her head from her terminal. Her desk was enormous, an old-fashioned style carved out of Thessian wood and varnished in shiny lacquer; Shepard saw her own reflection in the edges as she strode up to it. “It’s been three hours since I signed off on your release request. Do not tell me you’ve changed your mind already.”

“I want Gold Fire,” Shepard said flatly, stopping on the other side of her desk.

There was a pause, but the councilor’s fingers continued typing throughout.

“Convince me,” Irissa said evenly. Her expression was unreadable.

“I’m ready, I’m able, and I’m the best option to hunt down a terrorist you’ll find without resorting to hiring other terrorists.” And really, wasn’t that what the Spectres were all about?

“I have fifty-seven active Special Tactics agents,” Irissa said without missing a beat, “each of whom are more than capable of picking up where Williams lost her nerve.”

Shepard refrained from indulging in her gut reaction to defending Ashley.

“None of them have my track record,” she countered. Which was irrefutable. Nobody alive or dead had Shepard’s track record.

“Last I heard, you were still having complications with your leg,” the councilor said.

“Tended to,” she replied. She felt emboldened, enlivened. Back in her natural element, when faced with politics and bureaucracy, her philosophy was this: the fastest way out was straight through. “I’m fully capable of handling complications and self-administering field aid. I’ll jump through your medical hoops and get whatever forms signed before I ship off. _Put me on this_.”

Irissa eyed her sharply. She was still typing on her keyboard, but her gaze held. “You don’t make demands of me, Shepard.”

Shepard leaned her hands on the desk. “If you want another Torfan,” Shepard heard herself say, “you’ll send me.”

Irissa’s fingers stopped moving. The silence in the room was absolute.

She imagined the wheels turning in Irissa’s head. _The Butcher. The woman who eliminated the last resistance on the moon so thoroughly the Hegemony put a two billion credit bounty on her head. Established batarian hunter. A closer._

If she knew the councilor as well as she thought she did — _cut from the same cloth_ — then this would be a finishing argument. To the the public, Torfan was a war crime. To the Alliance, Torfan was a mission completed. To politicians, Torfan was an opportunity to strike fear into the hearts of the remaining pockets of batarian terrorists. Sending in Spectre Shepard would be overkill for one rogue slaver — and yet, to send a message to those remaining about the new Council’s intentions and power? One example was all they would need.

Let her be used as weapon again; maybe it was all she was good for. Shepard knew how to play that game.

When she spoke, Irissa didn’t sound nearly so opposed to the idea anymore; only hesitant. “It’s been a long time since Torfan, Shepard.”

“There’s no batarian alive who doesn’t know my name.” Shepard pulled out her final card, and prayed Ashley would forgive her for what she was about to say. “This is a slaver who’s been on the run from the Hegemony for thirty years and Citadel authority for longer. Anyone could’ve told you Williams was out of her wheelhouse — I’m here to save you any more trouble. Keep assigning this one arbitrarily and you’ll be watching your agents return to the Citadel one by one bruised and bloodied up — eventually they’ll start being mailed back in body bags. That’s your prerogative. Or send me, and know the job will get done the first time around.”

There was another beat before Irissa responded, but Shepard knew she’d won.

“…Consider yourself reinstated.” Her fingers resumed their typing on the digital keyboard. “Kindly speak to Bau for your debrief and mission updates. I expect a mission statement before your departure and monthly reports.”

“Where was he last seen? Williams’s logs?”

“Athame help me,” Irissa snapped, “Shepard, I gave you what you want. I am typing up your reassignment as I speak. I have forty-seven districts going through food shortages, seven ambassadors being blackmailed by hackers in the Traverse, and in half an hour I need to interrogate an attempted terrorist who tried to kidnap my daughter before the press gets ahold of the story. Get out of my office.”

Shepard did a one-eighty and stalked to the entrance.

“While you’re here,” Irissa said when she reached the doorway. Leave it to a politician to demand your attention even as they’re pushing you out of the room. Shepard turned. “As we’ve been talking, Williams pinged me a request to fill the spot you abandoned on the Parentia.”

Shepard waited. 

Irissa sighed. “Is this going to become a habit with you two?”

She didn’t think the councilor really wanted that answered. “We know where we’re most effective.”

“And Vakarian. I assume he’s in on this?”

Shepard didn’t reply immediately. She hadn’t thought about how Garrus would take the assignment change until this moment — a slap in the face, probably. It’s not like he could be more disappointed in her than he was already. Abandoning her post, avoiding his conversation, and then sticking him with another agent to mentor him like a babysitter. He would never take it out on Ashley, but Ashley was also no idiot — she’d be able to tell something was up with the two of them when she got on board. By then, though, Shepard planned to be long gone.

“Vakarian will succeed no matter what supervisor you throw at him,” Shepard said. “He doesn’t care.”

“I see,” said the councilor, and tapped something firmly on her keyboard. If Shepard had to guess, it would be the approval for Ashley’s request — but then, it wasn’t her problem anymore. “You may go.”

And Shepard went.


End file.
